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Not all of our important decisions can be made in a math-based way. Sometimes we have little or no historical data to guide us... The prime ingredient in these decisions is judgment.
There’s a concerning pattern…
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon figured this out during his pursuit to build the #1 customer focused company on the planet - even if you assign everything in your company a value, there are some decisions that just require human judgement. I am here to bring you one of those lessons that I have learned over decades of supporting IT.
I see a lot of immature companies measuring IT success by how few complaints they get. In the world of IT, this may mean your employees have successfully found workarounds.
A proper CIO perspective looks at the metrics and feedback, and isn’t satisfied. If feedback numbers are low, if feedback is short, if metrics are good, the CIO knows you still might have a problem. Silence in a decent sized organization isn’t satisfaction, it’s usually resignation. A CIO is going to start looking for the friction that people have stopped reporting.
The Workaround Census
This is a framework that I have built over years of managing IT teams and aligning them with intense customer satisfaction goals. It uncovers the truth lying beyond the metrics.
You must first realize you get what you measure and incentivize. Most IT departments measure and incentivize green metrics 🟢. The company incentivizes results ✅. So, you now have a potential blind spot if the IT department cannot measure what’s important to other departments. Namely, speed, interoperability, and access.
The CIO plays the primary role in aligning the technology strategy with the company strategy, when they are aligned the result is a frictionless experience that allows the company to efficiently add value to the market. That being said, the CIO is also responsible for reducing risk, which means if all you were measuring was results, you could fail spectacularly.
An optimal balance of low risk and high results is truly what is needed, but that is like measuring matter and dark matter. We only know of dark matter because of the effect it generates on matter. Otherwise, it is invisible. Therefore a CIO needs to create new ways to detect risk that isn’t perceptible. I have found that the Workaround Census is one of the best ways to uncover hidden risks.
The Framework
Either once a quarter or once a year create a survey using first-principles thinking and walk the floor - department by department and capture how each department communicates, collects information, and generates results. Most IT departments will be shocked. (especially with the tools available to people today)
Communication - Watch for channels that aren’t company supplied. It could be a simple text message that contains important information, a file, or a password. Communication channels that aren’t provided by the company are also; not backed-up, not held in litigation, and is not filtered through security protocols.
Information Collection - I had a company work in two separate CRMs because one department needed a special feature. Those two systems didn’t talk, so they had to maintain duplicate data and constantly manually refer to the other. Then they decided to create a spreadsheet as a quick reference, for weekly discussion. 😐 Folks, that’s 3 maintained systems and a whole lot of confusion. See how your departments are collecting information, that will tell you where the risks are.
Results - A department should produce results for the company. It may be financial analysis or marketing material. If a finance department spends a week of 12 hour days and weekends to prepare for month-end, you’ve identified an inefficient system. Technology can work for wonders for great processes, and seeing how your team creates those results can provide your business leverage when technology multiplies effort.
Workarounds
This is commonly referred to shadow-IT. When you perform a Workaround Census, you quickly see all of the ways shadow-IT has entered your organization. Sure, there are more manual workarounds, but not many people are still using paper. I’m talking about getting around company restrictions and using outside tools. I see dropbox or google used a lot. It’s free and easy. Today, I see a lot of consumer AI tools analyzing documents and being integrated into company tools.
When you neglect the things your employees don’t say and purely pin your success off of metrics, you lose the sovereignty of your information. Little by little, your information gets spread into personal email addresses, external cloud drives, and AI bots. You may have policies in place that prohibit these actions, but practically they aren’t being followed or enforced.
Shadow-IT is a entire topic for a different day, but the point is, your green metrics result in all of these risks that are never uncovered, because you emphasize the scoreboard over the intent.
Without a thoughtful analysis of your tech stack that works for your business and your employees, you will continue to have employees quietly work around areas of friction. They don’t show up in the numbers or the feedback, they just sit there, slowly draining morale, resources, sovereignty, and security. Dive beyond the numbers. Create a culture of understanding why the tech exists and use first principles to evolve your organization into one that cares about being great, instead of just looking great.
Until next week,
—Jared
Text Me: 314.806.3912
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