By Stephen E. Lipka, PhD, CMC

"Succeeding" in IT means you're a partner in the business, you're respected and sought out, and you're funded to do work that contributes to business. You can increase your chance of success by understanding your stakeholders. That starts with knowing who your stakeholders are and understanding what motivates them.

Before we begin the tour, let’s be clear why we’re using the term “stakeholder” rather than “customer”. The old IT mindset that knew or cared little about business process, practices, priorities, and issues has brought about a new scrutiny in the language we use when we refer to our internal peers. This reflects the shift in IT towards becoming an integral, collaborative part of the business rather than a necessary but abhorred one. It’s not “users” or “the business,” and “customer” may not truly reflect the collaborative relationship IT should have with peers. Thus, we’re using “stakeholder” to mean any organization that uses IT services, benefits from IT services, or pays for IT services, and that includes internal peers, peer organizations, and external customers.

So let’s take a tour.

Your Boss

At the top of every organization is the President/CEO, who is responsible for leading the company in the right direction. Generally, they seek better company-wide performance. But there are several personality attributes that affect their motivation. Let’s look at two:

• Strategic planner vs not: If your CEO believes in strategic planning for the business, you’ve got a free pass to find out what’s important. The critical words here are “believes in.” A true advocate puts strategy and execution plans in place, measures progress against them, keeps them current, and rewards contribution to achievement. For these leaders, achievement of the plan is what matters. For you, the CIO or IT Director, building an IT strategy and plan that supports the organization’s – and executing to it – makes for a happy CEO. On the other hand, if your CEO is a fair weather believer (and that includes those who pay lip service to strategic planning) what matters varies according to the interests of the individual. The extremes are minimizing cost (“IT is just a cost center”) to innovation (“IT should be a disruptive influence that will lead us into the future”). Unfortunately, you’ll have to figure that out on a case-by-case-basis. Worse, you may have to stay tuned as the CEO’s priorities change.

• “Do what I say” vs. “do what I do”: We’ve all worked for leaders who want an unlocked laptop on which they load all kinds of untested software but complain when the machine crashes. A more pragmatic group of leaders will accept what you give them, inquire about technology that interests them, ask you to test it, and suggest making useful technology part of standard issue. The former values personal productivity or cool technology and may also value immediate gratification; the latter values collective productivity.

There are other attributes of CEOs, but these two should give you some guidance on what could matter to them.

Not quite at the top of the organization is the CFO. CFOs focus on money. My experience leads me to conclude there are two kinds of CFOs – those who think of money as something to be retained and those who think of money as a tool to get more money.

You do not have flash or javascript support.

Average (1 vote)

Reply