Can We Get All Business Units to Speak the Same Language?

Computerworld — The CEO spoke five European languages fluently, but his chief concern in meeting with me, his new CIO, was that the IT services of this $20 billion telecommunications behemoth, with its major business units in France, Italy, Belgium, Spain and Germany and many others in 24 other countries, were a Tower of Babel.

We were in his Paris office for my initial session with him. He started by reviewing the situation. The enterprise had grown rapidly in recent years, mainly through major acquisitions in several European countries.

But, he said, "when it comes to IT, they just don't get along." Language wasn't really the problem, since he had established English as the official language of enterprise IT, but there were clearly other barriers to cooperation among the various IT units. And cooperation was key to the CEO's plans for making this conglomeration work. He had recently visited each business unit to deliver a clear message: When it comes to IT, we as an enterprise would have to work together and share our knowledge. It made no sense to keep knowledge isolated, so that IT in one part of the enterprise had to learn what IT in another part of the enterprise had already figured out. Such redundancy in IT increases our costs and time to market, and we lose our competitive edge as a result.

Since those visits, though, he had only seen a token gesture here and there. In the main, IT continued to be managed in the same isolated and contained fashion as always, and most of the 4,200 IT professionals in the enterprise talked only to the colleagues they already knew, usually within the same business unit.

What followed this summary of the situation was a beautiful example of leadership. First, the CEO took the blame. "It's partly my doing," he said. "I haven't provided any kind of framework for such an open exchange on IT matters." This was followed by a questioning look that invited me to jump in and save the day. "You certainly know where I'm going with this, don't you?" his look seemed to say. I took the bait and told him that I would visit each major business unit and then present such a framework for his review and approval.

He smiled then, and gave me six weeks.

On the ground

On each stop of my whirlwind tour of the major business units, I found IT units that were crisp, professional, cooperative and mostly up to date. I was in data-gathering mode, so I tried not to think too much about the framework that would be the actual deliverable. Instead, I concentrated on what I was seeing in each unit. I learned what I could about the individual IT professionals I met and their IT unit's proficiencies. From time to time, I was asked polite but direct questions, which allowed me to discuss the challenge we all were facing. One of the messages I delivered was that business unit IT staff would eventually participate in forums to help deal with the enterprise issues more collectively. And at each unit, I always managed to ask for ideas. Everyone gave me a vague sense of a willingness to cooperate for the greater good.

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