pitfall to not having your IT leader in
the loop—he or she may plot his or her own course and
agenda. For any function that can impact your operating
departments the way IT can (and which can consume the resources
that IT can), do you really want to take that risk?
Idea #2: Institute an Enterprise Wide IT
Project Governance Policy. This is just a logical extension of
Idea #1, since a major gray hair generator for your IT leader
is understanding what is most important. You see, there is no
shortage of ideas for new things (systems, services, software,
etc.) in the IT world. How many operating departments or
divisions do you have? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? Let’s say
you have 15, and each has three or four ideas for improving
their services (or cutting their costs, or enhancing their
operations) that require information technology in some
fashion. This is not an unreasonable scenario. Well, your IT
leader now has 45 to 60 ideas to respond to, and they are all
probably good! Your IT leader needs your help. There must be
one enterprise wide process that everyone follows to make
decisions and set priorities for where your IT dollars are
spent and for what your IT staff works on. And, by the way, the
local government leader must be the enforcer, and your overall
budgeting and spending processes must recognize and include
your IT project approval process—at least for the largest
projects. I know some localities whose threshold for IT project
governance and approval is $1M; here in Lynchburg, it is a mere
$50K. Regardless of dollar limits, you need a project
governance process—driven by your office, not your IT
leader.
Idea #3: Institute a Performance Based Pay
System for Your IT Staff. This is an issue of being competitive
in the workforce market place. Just ponder for a second: is
there any discipline in your entire governmental organization
that is more “like” the private sector than IT? I
doubt it. Even in professional disciplines that are readily transferable
(accounting, engineering, law), there are frequently government
specific nuances or specialties. Outside of emergency
communications (E911 and the like), I can think of no IT area
that has
a unique governmental focus.
As such, your IT staff has the most inherently transferable skill set in your organization.
a unique governmental focus.
As such, your IT staff has the most inherently transferable skill set in your organization.
The author is a guest columnist
who is the director of the Lynchburg IT Department.
who is the director of the Lynchburg IT Department.
re you
a local government manager, or someone in a leadership position
who sometimes wonders if you are getting the most out of your
information technology (IT) investment? Or, maybe IT is just a
mysterious black box to you, something that you intuitively
know your organization needs (even if you really don’t
understand how the stuff works), and that you assume is working
just fine, as long as your IT leader is not knocking on your
door. If your organization is like many that I know, you are
putting a tremendous amount of faith and trust in your IT
leader—often blindly, since you probably have the least amount of understanding as to how IT works, when compared to other support functions like finance, HR, and procurement.
As an organizational leader, would you
like some insight into how to make your IT organization more
effective? From inside the IT black box looking out, let me
offer five ideas to enhance the effectiveness and the value of
your IT function to your overall organization—and, at the
same time, make your IT leader’s life a little less
frustrating.
Idea #1: Give IT a Seat at “The
Table.” If yours is a forward thinking organization, this
is a no brainer. Assuming you have one IT organization serving
your overall organization, your IT leader’s largest
frustration is probably just trying to keep up with what
everyone wants, and then sorting through the priorities. If
your IT leader is not at the table and involved in the
discussions where major decisions are made, especially those
that affect multiple departments, then his or her life will be
miserable. He or she will probably be left to his or her own devices
to determine the greatest needs of the enterprise. Of course,
there is a parallel