Today, too many it professionals are overwhelmed or intimidated by the foreign world of business, while many business professionals view IT as a tangle of incomprehensible ones and zeros. As a result, IT remains shrouded from the rest of the business in a way that is unlike any other function. I frequently discuss this persistent struggle to demystify the black-box mentality surrounding technology with my friend and colleague, Tom Trainer. As the former CIO of industry giants such as Citigroup, Eli Lilly, and Reebok, Tom has experienced the struggle firsthand. His remarks on the subject struck me as more befitting of a conclusion for this book than I could ever pen:
When's the last time you saw a $50 or $75 million marketing campaign where other major functions of the business didn't have top-to-bottom visibility into what was going on? No management team would ever agree to fund a $75 million Super Bowl ad campaign and then just switch on the TV at halftime and hope they got it right. But that still happens all the time for IT projects with even bigger price tags than that.
Businesses are sick and tired of spending big-time money on technology without getting value. Right or wrong, there's been a long-standing perception, particularly among large companies who spend a large amount of money on IT, that IT is a chronic underachiever that promises the world but reliably fails to deliver. And, unfortunately , there are too many stories that reinforce that perception ”stories about ERP initiatives spiraling out of control, about failed supply chain platforms that cause devastating inventory shortages, or about million dollar software that goes unused.
CIOs themselves recognize that the salad days are over and they're going to be scrutinized like never before. They have to act like any other function that has a seat at the CEO's table and describe not only where the money went in plain, understandable terms, but more important, why it went where it did. Generally, other functional managers and the CEOs don't get enough visibility into what's going on in IT. It's not necessary that they understand every single aspect of technology, the bits and bytes and all that. What is necessary is that they are able to understand all the possible impacts (positive and negative) that technology can have on the business.
I find it amazing that the industry hasn't realized before now that something better change when we start spending on IT again. It's like the elephant in the corner ”nobody wants to talk about it. Well now people are going to start talking about it a lot more loudly and I think that an approach like BTM, as outlined in this book, is arriving at precisely the right time.
There is absolutely a need for a repeatable infrastructure or set of management capabilities that will help companies close the disconnect between business and technology. It's a capability whose time has come. When the tide's in and companies start spending again, I don't think businesses will be falling over themselves to throw money at IT anymore without a set of capabilities that allows them to get real value out of technology. The combination of principles, activities, and governance that makes up BTM will help them to do just that.
If I have learned one truism over the last 34 years of my career, it is this: Unless something fundamentally different starts to happen, individual enterprises are going to be as they were yesterday and last year and five years before that. And I don't believe there's a single company that can afford that.
