FEATURE: IT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
“Business continuity
relies on a stable
workforce.”
is no longer necessary for IT to treat the
end user community as a homogenous
mass of technophobes.
The application of a self-service
support strategy is critical to reaching
a high level of IT maturity. While
burdened by high daily volumes of
minor technical issues, the service desk
will remain in firefighting mode and
the transformation projects that are
essential to establishing advanced IT
capabilities will remain on the shelf.
A self-support strategy facilitates
widespread sharing of technical
knowledge and decentralises support
from the service desk, exposing the right
level of technical information to the
right end user groups. The challenge is
to scale-up peer support from a local
level to a global level, enabling end
users to collaborate across regions
and time zones to leverage previously
isolated pockets of knowledge. However,
www.intelligentcio.com
HDI research states that only 15% of
IT organisations enable collaboration
between end users. High-performing
IT organisations know their end user
community. They survey the community
to rank end users by technical capability
and confidence so that they can expose
the right level of technical information
to the appropriate groups. A successful
self-service portal must be more efficient
than contacting the service desk for end
users to change behaviour and adopt the
digital channel.
Attribute #7: Communicate a
persuasive vision for IT
Given the current state of faith in the IT
department, the lack of credibility is a
significant barrier to IT transformation
and the IT leadership must work hard
to convince business stakeholders that
investing in a ‘fresh start’ will deliver
benefits. Building credibility requires
an opportunity to do so. Business
executives need to give IT the chance
to articulate the vision that is driving
the transformation, and afford them
the necessary slack to enable forward
motion. They must understand that
achieving a high level of IT maturity
won’t happen overnight, and long-term
maturity may come at the expense of
short-term performance: things may
actually get worse before they get better.
For most organisations, the journey
will span a 24–36 month timescale, so
realistic expectations must be set and
commitment sought.
Clarity is the key. The CIO and senior
IT management team must plan out
a crystal clear IT maturity roadmap,
setting out the major steps and the
benefits that will be delivered along the
way. The CIO must then engage with
the full range of business stakeholders
to articulate the impact and benefits in
their respective areas of the business. n
INTELLIGENTCIO
45