HS054 Matching IT and Corporate Culture

  1. The Spectrum of IT Cultures: IT cultures can range from conservative to cutting-edge. It’s crucial to know where your organization falls on this spectrum to make informed technology decisions. 2. Aligning Technology Choices: Make sure your technology choices align with your organization’s IT culture and business goals. The latest and greatest may not always be the best fit. 3. The Burger King Model and Zero Trust: Conservative organizations can benefit from learning from their peers’ experiences before deploying new technologies. Zero trust is an example of a leading-edge technology that requires a shift in thinking. 4. Levels of IT Culture Maturity: Aim to be proactive and anticipatory to stay ahead of emerging technologies. The role of the CIO in aligning IT culture with business goals is crucial. 5. Aligning with Your Organization: Understand and align yourself with your organization’s IT culture. Explore new technologies that align with your organization’s goals. 6. Promoting IT and Team-Building Strategies: Check out Moody’s Research for IT and team-building strategies. Visit Packet Pushers for technical podcasts on wireless and Kubernetes. We value your feedback and suggestions for future episodes. Thank you for your support, and we’ll be back with another episode in a couple of weeks   Transcription Johna (00:00:00) – Welcome to heavy strategy, where unanswered questions are a lot more interesting than unquestioned answers. And of course, asking the right questions is one of the most important things you can do. One of the questions we like to ask when we are sitting down and working with a new client is what is the IT culture? It’s a bit of a misnomer because we’re not asking about the culture of the IT organization. We’re asking what the organization’s attitude is towards technology generally. Let me just kind of frame out what we’re talking about and then we can talk about maybe why it’s important and why we do this. We say at one end of the spectrum it is viewed entirely as a cost center. The goal is to keep things running without a hitch, and technology is generally deployed 3 to 5 years, anywhere from 2 to 5 years really behind the curve. We’ve by the way, we’ve researched that and we find that those things do go in parallel. If you view it as a cost center, you typically deploy technology very, very late. Johna (00:00:56) – We call that conservative. At the other end of the spectrum is leading edge or bleeding edge, where technology is viewed as a strategic advantage and a competitive differentiator. It’s deployed as soon as it’s remotely stable, usually three years ahead of peer organizations. And that, again, we call leading edge bleeding edge. And then in the middle you’ve got moderate and aggressive, which are sort of lesser versions of the the far extremes on the edges. So you have a spectrum that goes conservative, moderate, aggressive leading edge. And this is really an important characterization of IT organizations because it tells you something really key about how not only how technology is used, how it’s procured, but how to make the business case inside your organization for technology. And in that sense, it’s actually a spin off of the conversation that Greg and I had a little while back about evanescent versus enduring, because evanescent organizations are here today, gone tomorrow. They need to be ahead of the curve. They’re surfing the wave, so they’re likely to be aggressive or leading edge bleeding edge when it comes to deploying technology. Johna (00:02:03) – Enduring cultures are the opposite. They’re more likely to be conservative or moderate. Deploying technology really mostly as a as a peripheral cost savin...