Talking the Walk

Computerworld - After almost 40 years in IT (sadly, my first programming experience was on a computer with glowing vacuum tubes), I remain surprised that we are still talking about how IT people — whether they be the kids on the help desk, the CIO or anyone in between — can better communicate the value of what they do for the business. We are still trying to figure out how to credibly tie IT dollars to some bottom-line result.

There are many theories about why IT can’t seem to crack the business-talk code, but what I have seen in many businesses is that the conversation between business and IT is usually about what IT does, rather than what IT does for the business. While that sounds simplistic and obvious, it carries a subtle message: IT must talk about the services it provides to the business, rather than about the activities it executes to provide those services.

The conversation takes place in many different ways and venues, but it usually revolves around dollars: the cost of project development, the annual budget, the amount business is charged for IT services. This is as it should be. IT spends company dollars and management time and should explain its value in terms of how much of those resources it uses, how it uses them and what the business gets in return. What’s wrong, though, is that IT talks about dollars in categories that don’t relate to the business and can’t be used by business to make good resource-allocation decisions.

I know of a company whose IT group “bills” all of its project development services to business customers in categories such as specification delivery, configuration planning, project planning, acceptance testing and program development. To IT, a project is a collection of these activities. For ongoing applications, IT charges for data storage, network data transfer and CPU usage. An application uses resources in that way, so that’s how IT bills.

Those categories are great for managing and monitoring IT, but they are useless for explaining the value that IT delivers. Business people view those categories as irrelevant and incomprehensible. They are paying for project delivery that achieves a business result and applications that support a business process. They don’t care about configuration planning or CPU usage; they care about customer access to account data or sales team access to customer information. The focus has to be on what IT is doing for the business, not the activities IT carries out to do it. IT needs to stop thinking like a technology supplier and start thinking like a business-focused service provider.