Get technology right

Back in late spring of last year, Nicholas Carr’s “IT Doesn’t Matter” piece in the Harvard Business Review caused quite an upset in the IT community, so it was refreshing to pick up the February 2004 issue and see an article entitled “Getting IT Right.” The title of the piece quickly resonated with me — InfoWorld’s very tagline is “Get Technology Right,” so I felt obligated to see what the folks at HBR had to say about a topic near and dear to our hearts while also giving myself a little checkup.

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Quite simply, getting IT right remains a struggle for most organizations. According to a Gartner study cited in the piece, the average company wastes 20 percent of its corporate IT budget on purchases that fail to meet their original objectives. Charlie Feld, co-author of the piece, has seen and corrected IT failures firsthand as CIO at companies such as Frito-Lay and Delta Air Lines. Drawing from that experience he has come up with three simple principles for successfully managing IT: a long-term IT renewal plan linked to corporate strategy; a simplified, unifying corporate technology platform; and a highly functional, performance-

oriented IT organization. Feld and co-author Donna B. Stoddard fill the article with real-world examples of these principles in action in what is another must-read for CTOs.

So how am I doing? As I thought about efforts to link IT to corporate strategy at InfoWorld, I feel as though I’ve focused our IT organization in strategic areas, but keeping the focus takes constant attention. At its core, InfoWorld is a print and online content provider. Because print is a mature business, we are able to outsource much of the machinery of actually producing a magazine, so I have few in-house IT resources devoted to that area of the business. And because online is still immature, almost all of my staff’s time is focused there — outsourcing options for developing, maintaining, and operating dynamic and complex media Web sites simply do not exist. All this taken together, the ongoing challenge is managing our partners and keeping them aligned with our business strategy — “outsource and forget” is never an option.

The importance of a simplified corporate technology platform for successful IT can not be overstated. When I started at InfoWorld, our desktop PC environment consisted of hardware from half a dozen vendors with half a dozen variations of Windows; there was no standard disk image; and updates and patching were completely ad hoc. We now have hardware from only two vendors, every PC uses the same disk image, and security updates and patches are handled uniformly across all

systems. On the online side, we’ve consolidated multiple server operating systems into one — Linux — running on hardware from a single vendor. All this makes running IT much simpler, less expensive, and ultimately a better value for the business.

The final element, a high-performance IT culture, means aligning your IT leadership with your business leadership and holding IT accountable for performance. I would add an additional but intangible element: a general (but still disciplined) can-do spirit. In my experience, organizations that attack difficult projects with disciplined passion and a gut-level commitment solve problems more easily. Getting technology right isn’t always an intellectual exercise — sometimes it requires a little heart.