Better Informed and more Effective Leadership

Those at the top have much more to contribute

A toxic mixture of damaging delay, unnecessary cost, and reduced functionality, is too often present in today's major IT enabled business change programmes. Repeated studies have identified the main causes of failure which have included weaknesses in communication, poor collaboration, and lack of awareness of critical success issues at the top of the organisation.

Whilst business change best-practice is generally well understood by the change professionals, blatant and damaging deviations from best practice are often caused by dictat from enthusiastic business or government leaders with the best of intentions. However because these top people are usually amateurs in the IT enabled business change arena, they unknowingly introduce vastly increased risk of degradation or failure of their business change project.

Those with responsibility for business leadership therefore need to raise their game in order to become more intelligent users and better informed investors in, and drivers of, IT enabled business change. However, in our traditional business structure and culture, there has been reluctance by many in top Business and Public Sector positions to become more involved in matters such as IT that take them outside their comfort zone.

The answer is not actually to teach board members about IT, but simply to generate a better understanding of their business threats and opportunities in the new e-business context, and the critical success issues in relation to dealing effectively with those threats and opportunities. Today's typical IT programme Steering Committee does little to facilitate that understanding and is in need of a complete overhaul.

A more appropriate top forum for today must encourage board members to become more involved in the IT enabled business change process. Such exposure to areas that have traditionally been outside their sphere of competence then becomes an educative process that quickly generates more perceptive and better informed direction of the change process.

Decisions take account of IT constraints and business opportunities and risks in equal measure, thereby avoiding many of today's poorly informed decisions that have been based on only one side of the story. Accountability for sound decision making, and ultimate success or failure, then lies clearly at the door of the members of this new forum, which in Public Sector terms might well include the Minister responsible for the activity being addressed.

The considerable cost and efficiency benefits that flow from setting up such a top level forum appear very quickly and grow exponentially. This is not however the end of the story.

As this forum matures it places more critical demands on those lower down within the organisation through more perceptive questioning, better informed appraisal of performance and a growing demand for new business intelligence for forward business planning. These demands from the top naturally lead to further improvements in the change management process, more effective collaboration across cultural divides, and clearer business accountability for targeted results throughout the organisation.

This could be considered as a truly virtuous cycle that starts where it should - at the very top.