“I don’t want my guys to be technical. That’s your team’s job.”
Imagine if Information Technology pushed “day-to-day support” to the business. Before you shoot this idea down, the concept is already actively being embraced by many smaller technical companies. Go read “A Year Without Pants”, by Scott Berkun, the story of WordPress.com where this idea and other evolutionary collaborative work space ideas has roots.
I call it, “IT Enablement”. A focus on giving people the tools and trust, with strong oversight and governance from IT. The alternative is zero trust, which is the popular direction for a majority of risk-adverse IT organizations. Enablement is a philosophical challenge to today’s status quo and not embraced by many.
As with all disruptive ideas, success is determined through buy in and culture. So, when a strategic directive to eliminate the necessity for a help desk landed, we responded with goals to enable business units with a heightened degree of endpoint control while IT provides just governance and security controls.
Long story short, this direction bombed. I wish to write to talk briefly about what happened and why.
Problem 1. A Misunderstanding. As what often happens in leadership meetings, it’s often not what’s said, but what wasn’t. In the discourse, I realized that my interpretation of what our senior leaders want translated to situations that put IT directly in opposition with our conventional business leaders. How so? Read on.
Problem 2. An Revolution. As this new direction took flight, did I prepare leaders? Socialize this direction? Align to goals or strategy? Not satisfactorily. In fact, the culture shift attempted occurred at the send of an email: Effective immediately, support responsibilities are owned by our end users. And as you might have guessed, leaders did not embrace. In fact, we were criticized in town hall and by other leaders. A series of ouch moments.
Problem 3. Road map to Transformation. About this time, IT leaders met and realized the bigger challenges in front of us, based on our misread and failed embrace of technical ownership. The ‘digital transformation’ was born. Here is our transformation road map:
Solution 1. Simplify The Landscape. From policies, standards, and procedures to technology, software, and networking.
Solution 2. Monitor & Transparency. Every single thing in IT should be measurable. A tool will not just focus on measuring and reporting, but giving our technical support teams access for transparency.
Solution 3. Education and Consult. Information Technology should be consulting our business leaders, educating our people, and establishing the knowledge culture. A baseline of technical skills and measuring the values of providing.
The goal: To eliminate the help desk (Level 1) by 2020.
This blog took me more than a few weeks to write. How to talk about a subject like this is not easily done nor written about. And our journey about this topic consumed 3-4 months. Upon reflection, it was a difficult time. However, it was worth the attempt, I learned quite a bit from many leaders with legitimate perspectives, turning this fail into learning moments.
If you have successfully put to rest your IT help desk and embraced Enablement, please write me. I would love to learn how you did it and challenges faced…
\\ JMM