Put briefly, the thinking seems to be: if you set an IT organisation up to run as a business, you create a supplier-customer relationship with other parts of your wider organisation – and this relegates you to being a simple order taker. You’ll have to implement the requirements you’re given, and often these will be out of whack with what the organisation will really need and will raise IT costs over the long term, making an internal IT operation even less attractive and making you more likely to be outsourced.

In my experience this analysis is plain wrong, and comes from simplistic thinking about what the phrase “run X as a business” might mean. Being more business-focused has multiple facets to it, and blindly interpreting the idea leads you to daft, simplistic conclusions. Applying similar thinking to cooking would lead to the advice “don’t use sharp knives; if you do that it’ll only be a matter of time before you chop a hand off”.

To be clear: my experience and advice diverges with these other opinions not because I disagree about the risks of IT becoming a “simple order-taker”; but rather because I disagree that running IT as a business means you have to become a simple order-taker and everything else is excluded. There’s much more to it than that. The key is to see the relationship between IT and other areas of a business as having three key layers.

When I look at IT leaders who have really become strategic players at board level (and I’ve been talking to them ever since my work on The Technology Garden), it’s not the case that their organisations have stopped becoming service-focused and focus wholly on hanging out with senior business managers. If anything their organisations are more service-focused than the norm.

In the best-performing organisations, the “run IT as a business” idea is primarily about an inward-looking perspective. It’s about putting repeatable processes in place, creating a service culture, figuring out the actual costs of delivering IT services through IT processes, and looking for ways to increase IT process efficiency and effectiveness.

In high-performing IT organisations, when it comes to the outward-looking perspective (the relationship between the IT organisation and other parts of a business) the relationship has at least three layers:

1. As a foundation, IT teams have to deliver reliable operational services in line with clear promises and in the context of defined cost expectations and budgets.
2. When it comes to using IT to enable business in new ways the relationship works at a higher level, using different teams, reporting structures, skills and incentives within multidisciplinary joint IT-business teams.
3. The top layer acts to mitigate the risks of individual business units driving change that is counterproductive to the organisation as a whole, typically through some kind of IT governance structure that helps to ensure that significant IT investments are considered in their proper strategic context and that the costs and risks are properly understood by all.

That’s three layers: IT operation/service delivery; IT-business engagement; and governance/strategy. You can be focused on service provision and also on partnering. As long as you understand the bigger picture.

Although it’s an on-demand webinar, we’d be very happy to receive any questions you might have – we’ll do our best to respond to them all.

This is the first time we’ve done a research webinar ourselves using this technology, and we’re really pleased with how it’s turned out. We really hope you enjoy it! We’re likely to do more of these in 2010, so your feedback is very welcome if you have any…

This was far and away my favourite!

As someone who first saw stickers a bit like this on CDs (woah, remember them?) in the late 1980s like Appetite For Destruction and Straight Outta Compton – it just made me smile… perhaps it’s about time we started offending some people ;-)

OK, it’s not exactly in the same league as a bottle of your favourite whisky, a must-have high-fashion piece or a day at Gleneagles, but it’s not in the league of bad socks either…

As our lead analyst on the topic of BPM I’ve been busy working behind the scenes with our lead Collaboration analyst Angela Ashenden (see her excellent Collaboration blog) on a theme of research that we’ll be developing and delivering throughout 2010, looking at how the worlds of Business Process Management and Collaboration are coming together. We’re finding that this is a topic with a lot of interest and resonance within our existing client base and we think it’ll continue to be a vital consideration through 2010 and beyond.

Our first deliverable is a freely-available webinar, open to all, called “When BPM and Collaboration collide”. It’ll be 25-30 minutes long and will provide an overview of the related topics of Social, Collaborative and Dynamic BPM. In it we’ll:

• highlight the synergies between collaboration technologies and today’s BPM programmes
• look at the main drivers for interest in these synergies and why these topics are so important now
• look at what the business value of combining these two technology areas looks like
• look at the potential of new developments in the market and show how opportunities are likely to develop over the next 12 months.

The webinar will be available on-demand from next Monday, but we don’t want this to be a one-way broadcast. Once you’ve viewed the webinar, we’d be very happy indeed to receive your questions and we’ll do our very best to answer them all – we’ll provide details of how you can submit questions at the end of the presentation.

All you need to do to access the webinar from Monday Dec 14th is to make sure you sign up for (free) Guest Pass access to our site, if you’re not already registered. If you’d like us to send you a link to the webinar on Monday just email us in advance; alternatively, look out for an update on this blog on Monday – I’ll provide the link then.

We hope you find the webinar useful – and please feel free to tell your friends!