January 05, 2004
(Computerworld)
Tight budgets and heavy workloads haven't extinguished creativity in these IT departments. It's being sparked anew among IT leaders by their very best resource – their staffs.
What happens when IT leaders turn to their staffs for innovative and cost-saving ideas? In an IT department where the lines of communication are truly open and working, those IT leaders hear a lot of useful feedback, but they also get an earful on the problems.
"Bad news is good," explains William G. Head, chief technology officer and director of technology at Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Kansas City, Mo., the accounting operation for the Department of Defense. "It says you've got communication."
And if your staff isn't afraid to speak up, then you've got a channel through which to draw great ideas from all levels of the organization. But how does a busy CIO or CTO maintain a culture where all workers – even those at the lowest levels – are encouraged to speak up and know that they won't be punished for saying what their supervisors don't want to hear? By making time, says one expert.
"I don't care how busy you are," says Linda Pittenger, CEO of Gartner Inc.'s People3 Inc. "It's critical for the leader to have an ear on what's going on, or he's going to turn around and there's not going to be anyone standing behind him." Most methods of communication will work, she says, but you need to ask yourself, "What do I want to get out of this? What do I expect out of this?" And likewise, Pittenger says, you need to make sure you can answer the employees' question, "What's in it for me if I participate?"
For Head's IT group of 2,100, which spans eight locations and has been working with a smaller IT budget this year, the incentive is job security. More than one-third of Head's staff members are consultants, who he says are treated as regular staffers. "We don't throw things over the partition to them," he says. "I expect them to bring good ideas to the table, just like our employees would internally." His staff has grown to accept that.
At Lincoln Financial Group in Philadelphia, Jason Glazier, senior vice president and chief technology and e-commerce officer, rotates members of his 800-person IT staff in and out of two groups established to drive innovation. The groups keep tabs on what works and what needs improvement across the company's divisions. The IT Advisory Counsel comprises Glazier, the divisional CIOs and IT auditors.
Glazier is also executive director of the Architecture Committee, which includes lower-level employees who understand the technology details and can recommend subject-matter experts to join smaller groups of up to four to eight people for brainstorming meetings and conference calls.
"I'm very supportive of people self-educating. If you're going to truly be great at what you do, you're going to be constantly trying to educate yourself more," whether it's by jumping into new opportunities at work or pursuing education on the side, Glazier says.
Regularly attending both groups' meetings keeps him in touch with his large staff. "That's where I spend a lot of time – making sure that we make good decisions," says Glazier.
What comes out of group meetings and brainstorming sessions depends on the track record of the leader: Can he make people feel comfortable enough to speak up in front of their peers and direct managers? "Research tells us that managers tend to hang around and listen to people who are like themselves," says Pittenger. "It's harder for people to want to listen to ideas from people who are very different from them."
Micheal Moon Sr., CIO and global vice president of information services at Haworth Inc. in Holland, Mich., has had success with brown-bag lunches. He schedules time every few weeks to pull together 10 to 12 workers – a mix of infrastructure and process people and developers – from his 175-member IT staff for an informal feedback loop. "It usually tends to create ideas in different areas," he says. For example, he's been able to consolidate servers, save costs using voice over IP and introduce an application development method.
And even though the office furniture manufacturer has a program that rewards people who come up with cost-saving ideas, Moon says he looks at other ways of keeping his staff involved in innovative thinking. Some IT employees who attend user conferences have to "pay their way," he says, by coming back with ideas that generate savings greater than what it cost for them to go to that conference. Others are required to submit trip reports or, depending on their job level, are asked to make presentations at meetings. "Those drive ideas as well," he says.
Moon also holds all-hands meetings and technology briefings on specific topics. And he invites companies, like his e-procurement vendor partner, into the office to brainstorm with members from his process teams, which he calls "internal consultants," who make up about 12% of the IT staff.
Occasionally, workers bring up so many valid issues in a meeting that a decision is made to not move forward, which might be disheartening or confusing to employees. "A lot of that is based on the quality of the person running the subgroup," says Glazier. "If people really can't agree in the subgroup, then they can escalate it to me, and I'll decide."
Whichever strategy a leader chooses to communicate with his staff can work. But it's the leader's responsibility to make it succeed, and that boils down to how much value is placed on hearing what people have to say.
