In a previous blog, we covered the importance of an IT governance framework. Ensuring that your IT Manager can drive the narrative about IT within your organisation is a critical tool in maintaining an IT governance framework.
A well–formulated IT narrative or strategy addresses your organisation’s ‘holistic’ IT needs. It answers the questions of the functional areas of the organisation before they are asked.
There are some key risks in failing to ensure that your IT Manager controls the IT narrative within your organisation.
Decreased value of IT
Not controlling the IT narrative impacts the value of IT within your organisation.
If functional areas within the business are questioning – consciously or not – the IT narrative, it will inevitably impact on the IT strategy and ultimately the IT governance framework.
What starts with questioning will lead to a dilution of the value of IT within the organisation.
Undermining the IT strategy
When the value of IT is diminished, the natural consequence is that your organisation’s carefully considered and deployed IT strategy will get undermined.
The signs are obvious. The executive starts dropping into the IT tactics – ‘I saw this great app for…’. People make suggestions prompted by a conference they attended. Or the last person to whom they spoke. People start making decisions that are, at best, partially aligned to the IT strategy or ignore it completely.
Uncoordinated actions, magic bullets and unicorns
In questioning, undermining and ‘solving’ their challenges, people formulate actions that are uncoordinated with the IT strategy. They look for the magic bullet – ‘this one move will fix all the problems’ – and unicorns – ‘I’ve found this supplier, they can manage everything for us, they secure the hardware, manage the fleet, everything’. They start issuing instructions rather helping IT formulate strategy. They might start dealing with vendors directly.
The endpoint of these actions is a hodgepodge of providers, solutions and experts. The break point is a pervasive view that ‘IT isn’t working’, undermining not just your IT department but your IT strategy and IT governance along with it.
