It seems widely accepted these days that diversity is an asset to a business. So, how does a small-to-medium sized business (SMB) develop sound IT and business strategies when the leadership headcount is fairly small, IT leadership often is a single person, and there may be a founder-owner who dominates decision making?
I’ve been thinking about this as I reflect on some of the dubious decisions and strategies of my current employer (default management law firm) from the past several years. Here are a few that dominate my daily existence:
- We chose to build our own back-office case management system (CMS) when there were proven commercial systems available. We now have a high cost of ownership compared to the commercial systems, without gaining any competitive advantage.
- The system mentioned in the previous bullet was built from 2012-2013 as a client-server system, forsaking a web-based solution. We now experience all of the client-server maintenance issues (400 users spread out geographically) that made web-based applications so attractive to businesses way back in the 1990s.
- We chose to forsake investing in a subsidiary law firm’s CMS, with the rationale that in the near future, that system would be replaced. It’s been nearly ten years, and the legacy CMS is still running with no investment in features and automation, which is severely hurting the subsidiary firm.
- Several years ago we chose not to migrate from a legacy system because it was time-consuming for IT and the business to figure out the data migration requirements. At the time everyone was comfortable and familiar with the legacy system, so keeping it around felt like it would be no big deal. We’re still paying heavily with quality and productivity issues for what amounted to a myopic decision of convenience.
- A decision was made to build a custom invoicing and check printing system when we already had a commercial accounting system in-house. This decision was made, again, out of convenience, because figuring out how to interface with the commercial accounting system was considered too challenging.
My intent here is not to cast stones (even though it appears that I am) regarding past strategic initiatives, but instead, it is to show how dubious decisions can be made when there is a lack of thought diversity.
Many enterprises have cultural challenges. My twenty years at General Motors showed me how the culture of a massively large organization can suffocate change. At an SMB, change should come more easily. However, it seems to me that the big risk isn’t enacting change, but rather, it’s with enacting the right change when there is a lack of thought diversity. At least that’s the conclusion I’m drawing on why so many dubious decisions were made. Decisions for which a price continues to be paid.
So, what should a resource constrained, diversity-deficient SMB do to mitigate the situation? Participating in industry trade groups and business associations certainly is a good start. Creating an advisement board of external resources and finding a similar, but non-competitive business to share and vet ideas with are also good approaches. Engaging consulting firms (for both IT and the business) for strategy and internal assessments should also be a common practice as it can quickly expose a business to a large variety of choices, across many industries (Bain & Co., n.d.)
Ultimately, the answer to the “diversity of thought” problem is for the business to engage its external environment as much, and in as many ways, as possible. Business and IT strategies are far too important to trust to so few.
References
Bain & Company. (n.d.). What to expect from management consulting. Retrieved from http://www.bain.com/offices/brussels/en_us/careers/top-management-consulting.aspx
Scott,
ReplyDeleteI can sense a growing frustration, possibly from different camps in your SMB organization. And you're right; the challenges of leadership decisions can be frustrating, particularly when leadership is not thoroughly informed. However, I think headcount does not really matter, i.e. whether it's a large company or a small startup. I'd like to remember Google, Yahoo, or the early days of Apple. I think it is the quality of heads that count (unfortunately in the real world of business decision-making, some heads do not count). I agree though that diversity can help, but only because it improves the chances of thought diversity, but is never a guarantee.
The good news is that they have you there in the organization to promote cost and value management with the leadership, and hopefully straighten them out. You might be a minority voice at this point, but I think you are one of heads that count, and that should be sufficient to gain ground and educate the organization with a better operational model through your guidance as an EA. Hopefully, more heads that count will make decisions that enable towards mission. The journey can be on a slow long and winding road. But as long as they are still listening to you, then I would think that there's a lot to be happy for.
I enjoyed reading your very candid posts throughout the semester, and they have given insights to the challenges of this EA discipline that we're trying to master.
All the best.
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