How To Go From Techie To Ceo

When your senior management walks in every day, do they hold meetings and there's nobody from IT? Do they send emissaries over to IT like, it's a foreign trading company? They wouldn't do that with sales. They wouldn't do that with R&D. They use them as an integral part of the business. So why are they treating IT as some kind of unfortunate pimple?

You can help IT claim their rightful seat at the dinner table, by solving business problems instead of IT problems. When IT needs a budget increase, they may say something like "We need 12 more people." And senior management might say, "Why do you need 12 more in IT?" And IT says, "Well, we've got to change the code, and we've got to upgrade the platform and we've got to do this other technical stuff." And nobody understands what IT is saying.

But what if IT says, "Well, right now we're not getting information at the point of contact with the customer. If the people on the phones had this information quicker instead of having to call back, we could up-sell. We could turn our information into profitable wisdom at each customer encounter?"

That's talking and thinking like a CEO. That's understanding the interlocking/co-dependent world of business and information. That's the outcome and clarity that comes from approaching every business day as if you are already the CEO.

What is the most important function of your IT department anyway? Is it a support function, like finance or general counsel? Are you supposed to just keep that old IT ship engine running? Put oil in it? If they say full speed ahead, you go full speed? If they say, turn right, you turn right?

Pretend for a moment you are already the CEO. Now what is the most important function of IT? You need results, business-transforming results through innovative ideas. You need to look at the integrated whole. You're concerned with knowledge at the point of contact with your customer.

You want to cross sell and up sell customers better. You want to track profitability by customer. Cost reduction is nice, but most companies are trying to do that anyway because it's easy. You want to up the bottom line and the top line. You need information. Information is the fuel, which runs any organization.

Information, wisdom and knowledge are the purview of the IT department. And the IT function has, by far, the greatest potential for affecting the profitability of any business. Approach every day as if you are already the CEO. Think about issues, problems and solutions from that perspective. You will gain clarity in decisions. It will give you better insight into contributions you can make to help accelerate those business results.

You've got a ton of information coming in. You have a ton of data every day. And probably only about five pounds of it is really relevant and only about four ounces is going to make a difference for higher profits. You must distill out the four ounces every time, infallibly, and get it to the person who can use it. What you're IT department is probably doing right now, is giving everybody two tons. And they don't know what to do with it.

Using your new CEO perspective, you can help your IT department stop sitting at the children's table at dinner. Stop looking at technology. Stop looking at mechanics. Start looking at business outcomes and profit. You can help your company capture the business it has been missing. Stop letting IT just sit there like a lump. Help your IT department switch from being transactional to being transformational.

IT is a powerful delivery mechanism for accelerating business results. Information at the right time to the right person can have explosive impact on the top and bottom lines. The quickest path to success is to be the one to deliver that information. By acting and thinking like the CEO, you may soon become one.