Dewayne Washington is back for part II of his Secrets of Analytical Leaders podcast with Eckerson Group. In part I, Dewayne and I discussed the role of the CIO, and in this episode, we talk about the keys to IT success.

Dewayne is a senior consultant with 20+ years of experience in BI and Analytics in over two dozen verticals. He is the former BI manager at Dallas/Fortworth International Airport and the current CIO at The Business of Intelligence. He is also the author of the book Get In The Stream, the ultimate guide to customer adoption, and his Data Warehousing and Mobile Solutions implementations have been featured in CIO Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. Dewayne is also a sought-after speaker and mentor for organizations striving to leverage BI and Analytics to meet business goals, thus earning him the title, BI Pharaoh.

Key Findings:

• Understand IT's customers - ask questions, listen to the answers, and perform surveys
• Make sure implementations are up, accessible, and easy to use (UAE)
• Track the success of your implementations
• Hire people who are hungry, humble, and smart
• IT's reputation should be the champion for the business, the engine for the business
• It's not that people dislike change, they dislike the barriers to change

This is an excerpt from the podcast interview between Henry H. Eckerson and Dewayne Washington.

Henry: How should an IT team define success?

Dewayne: I think an IT team should define success outside of themselves. We talked before about blurring the lines between IT and the business, and when you’ve allowed the business to be successful whether that’s moving the bottom line from a financial perspective or that’s allowing people to be more efficient. Whatever that is, you should define success by that, if you’re training more people, if you’re empowering more people…

I remember one time we had a team and there were two guys responsible for putting together a report. Now, of course, their job was more than just putting together reports, but these two guys had spent two weeks every month together, so effectively a full man-year just to put together this monthly report – and so, we automated that report and literally freed up an entire man-year so those people could get to the business of what they were hired to do instead of just putting together some type of report.

Whenever you’re moving the bottom line for your customer whether it be time, hard dollars from a budgetary perspective, then you can call yourself successful, but, remember, you’re only as successful as your last implementation or your next implementation. So you want to make sure that you don’t just rest on a success that you had last week, last month or last year.

Henry: Should IT have a consistent top 3 goals or a rotating goal that you’re always chasing after?

Dewayne: There is one goal that I have. I call it the “UAE”. One, ‘Is the system up?’ We always talk about uptime. That’s the “U”.

The “A” is ‘Is it accessible?’ A lot of the times we’ll say, ‘Yeah, the system was up’, and we’ll say, ‘No, we have no downtime’, but our users couldn’t get to it. Just because you had the system up, if they couldn’t access it, then, that doesn’t count.

Then, we want to have something that’s a little bit tougher to define, a little tougher to track as a metric. It has to be easy for people to use. A lot of times, we’ll put together a solution that is up and it works; it’s efficient, but it’s not easy to use and that’s one of the reasons users don’t use it.

So UAE is very important to an IT organization: are your systems up? Are they accessible? And are they easy to use for your users? Those three things are going to be congruent. They’re going to be a staple as far as the solutions that you put out for your organization.

So it could be as simple as a network – was the network up? Was it accessible? Was it easy for people to send things back and forth? So, for example, it could be up and it could be accessible, but it may take 30 minutes to send an email back and forth and be extremely slow. Well, that’s not satisfying the needs of the customer. So if you use that UAE, across the board you’ll find that universally it’s a good gauge of how impactful your implementation is.

Henry: If the UAE is the goal, do you have strategies, best practices that you would suggest to attain it?

Dewayne: The best strategy is to track it. Literally track it. Are you tracking your uptime? Are you tracking your accessibility?

People say, ‘Well, it’s hard to track if it’s easy or not.’ Not really. Just ask your customers. Are you sending them surveys dealing with IT performance? Are you sending them surveys dealing with the IT helpdesk? Is it a helpdesk or is it a no-helpdesk? So are you doing the same things that you’re empowering your users to do? Especially from a BI perspective, doing reporting and gauging and trending, are you doing that same thing for your IT organization, making sure that you are a partner to the business?

So, from a best strategies perspective, the concept is very simple – you track it. You track it and you trend it, and you show it back to not only your executive management, but you show it to your downline as well and say, ‘Hey guys, this is how we’re doing.’ And not only are you closing tickets and closing the right tickets on time, but you’re looking at the types of tickets that are coming in and saying, ‘Hey, what can we do to eliminate these type of tickets coming in?’ For example, you may notice that a lot of people are calling in because they forgot their passwords and you’re having to do a password reset. Well, create something that allows them to do a password reset themselves so they don’t have to spend time calling IT.

So whenever you are actively tracking and serving your customers with love and care, then those answers should just jump out at you. Is it up? Is it accessible and it’s easy? And so, from a best practice perspective, just track them and ask your customers how you’re doing on those metrics. They’ll let you know.

Henry: In your experience, what are the top three pitfalls or things that IT does that they should avoid doing?

Dewayne: Number one is attitude towards the customer. I would say that’s the number one thing. The feeling that the customer should be privileged that you even exist - that attitude will just trump and destroy the solution that you come up with. I’ve seen it so many times. I’ve seen it at the low levels from the DBA and network admin all the way up to CIOs.

Ignoring the customer needs is number two, as in, literally not paying attention or not listening to what they are really needing, and it goes beyond just looking at a request on a piece of paper. Going down and spending time with them, sitting where they sit and truly understanding the customer and what they do and not ignoring when they bring you a problem or solution.

IT people have a saying that the problem is between the keyboard and the screen. In other words, the customer is the issue. There are a lot of times when problems arise and it is a user issue, but look beyond that. Is it really a user issue or is it a lack of training issue? Did you train them to do exactly what they’re doing or did you just throw some software at them and expect of them to make it happen?

Number three would is putting people in positions to succeed.

When I do a conference, I will start the conference out and hold up a hundred-dollar bill. I’ll ask people, ‘How many of you guys would love to have this hundred-dollar bill?’ I’d look at those hands go up everywhere and then I’d say, ‘What would you do if I told you that I took some money, I put it in an envelope and I taped it to the bottom of one of these seats and one of you guys are sitting in the seat right now?’ and they say, ‘Oh, we’d start looking for it right now.’

I said, “Well, I actually did take some money, put it in an envelope and taped it to the bottom of one of these chairs and someone is sitting in it right now,” and you should see people with their $2,000-suits willing to get down on the floor, looking under the seats and somebody does find it. The reason I do that is because we always say, ‘Change is hard. Change is tough. You know, it’s hard to get people to change.’ I wanted to prove that I’m pretty positive that these people hadn’t crawled on the floor all day, probably all week since they’d been at the conference, right? So this is a change and not only is it a change, it’s probably one that I couldn’t have begged them to do. Yet, you have these grown people on the floor looking under the seats, and I didn’t ask them to do that. I never said, ‘Get on the floor and look under your seats.’

Even though they changed, they didn’t have a problem with changing and they changed immediately and they changed without me asking. So the question is, ‘Well, why did they do that?’ Because, number one, I gave them something definite that they can understand. They understand money. I gave them an opportunity to have something they want. They want the money, and then I told them where it can be found and so “they” set a path to go get it and changed themselves.

It’s not change people don’t like. They don’t like to be changed. They don’t want me to come and enforce something upon them. However, if I’m giving them a path to greatness and something they already want, the only way I can know what they wanted that is to understand who they are and what their needs are, what their pain points are.

Henry: How do you build a successful IT team?

Dewayne: You start with the right people. Hungry, humble and smart, not intellectually, but socially intelligent, starting with the right people and that’s even the right person at the top.

Nowadays, you can’t just have a hardcore programmer as a CIO. He’s got to be a savvy guy. He’s got to have a vision. He’s got to be able to build a team and create a team and navigate and give them space to fail. He’s got to be able to befriend all aspects of the business, both from a peer perspective and from an executive board perspective and break things down in ways that are understandable. No one wants to hear about your AWS implementation in the cloud. What they want to know is you will be able to tell proactively who’s about to quit before they quit and do something about it, so being able to come up with solutions that are understandable to the business, but may be high tech on your side.

So, to build that team, you need the right people, put them in the right place, and give them space to fail. For me, failure doesn’t exist. It only exists if you quit. If you don’t quit, you just found another way to not do it. So give them space to do that. Trust the people that you hire after you hire people that you trust.

Henry: So, you’ve mentioned it’s important to integrate IT with the business and understand each other. On the extreme ends, what happens when you do or don’t integrate IT with the business?

Dewayne: I remember a business VP got a call one time and he turned around and called me directly. He said, “Hey, Dewayne, I got a call from this company and I think this is software that we can utilize. I talked to my team about it and they want to give it a demo, but I don’t want to do this without you being there. Can you be here and let us know if this is something that we really need to implement and we really need to go with?” and I got that call proactively. I took a look at it with them and after the demo, I turned to him and said, “Hey, look, this is actually a great piece of software. Not only do I think you guys need it, I think we need it more. So, instead of you buying it, I’m going to buy it, so you don’t have to worry about it coming out of your budget. It will come out of my budget. I’ll implement it for you and the rest of the airport as well. You’re going to use 10%, but there’s about 60% of it we can use for everybody else.”

Now, if I tell him he doesn’t need something down the road, he’s going to believe me. He’s not just going to say, ‘Well…here’s IT doing the roadblock again.’ Also, I’ve had many occasions where a VP or EVP stops and says, ‘Hey, Dewayne, it’s close to the end of the year. I’ve got some money. Can you come help us out? Can you come up with something to help us out?’

Now, that’s on the good extreme. Let me tell you the bad extreme. The bad extreme is very simple.

I remember I was at a conference one time speaking, and there was a gentleman talking about their BI implementation and they were from a school district in Florida, and it was gorgeous. I was very, very impressed by their implementation.

Afterwards, I sat down and talked with them and I was surprised to find out that this gentleman was not from IT. He was from the business side. So, I said, ‘You guys are from the business side, but you’re presenting something that’s IT-based. What should IT look like and what your CIO should look like?’

He said, “Well, funny story. We came to IT, and they told us fifteen different ways of “no”, ‘We can’t do it. It’s going to cost too much and take too long and da-da-da… So we decided to let them all go and we created it ourselves.”

I said, “So you let your BI team go?

He said, ‘No, we let the entire IT department go.”

So the extreme is that you no longer have a gig. If I can do this technology from my iPhone, they’re not going to tolerate too many “no’s” from you. So you’ve got to be careful. People are hipped to technology. They’ve got more technology in their back pocket than we had in the biggest, most fancy data centers 25 years ago. So that’s the extreme.

Henry: It’s important to build cohesion between IT and the business. How much of that is solely up to the IT leadership, the CIO?

Dewayne: This is going to sound a little bit unfair, but I would say 100% of it. I haven’t seen a bunch of issues when CIOs reach out to the business and say, ‘I want to be your friend.’ That doesn’t cause an issue, because they’re so used to IT being closed-closet and behind closed doors that the business welcomes that. The only issue comes if you start making a bunch of promises you can’t deliver on and people stop listening to you. But you’re not going to have an issue reaching out and creating that bridge.

It’s up to you to create the bridge to walk across. I mean, it’s 100% up to you and the thing is there’s no requirement for them to walk back across the bridge and understand IT. The requirement is for you to walk across the bridge and understand the business, walk back across the bridge to the IT side and come up with a solution that makes sense. So 100% of that is on you. There’s no responsibility from a business perspective. Once you build that bridge, they will start walking across.

Henry: There’s a lot of talk about running IT like a business. Can you explain what that means?

Dewayne: Well, it means a couple of different things. Now, I’ll take it to the extreme. In a business you have expenses and you have revenues. You have KPIs. You have things that you’re measuring on a regular basis, and you have people that you answer to, your stakeholders.

IT is a huge expense on any company, but look at what the company gets. I want you to go back, and number one, gauge your performance, not just IT against IT, but gauge your performance with the business. Go out and survey them.

Companies survey their customer all the time, so you should do the same thing – when is there a lack of business and are you getting better? How do people feel about the service that you bring? How do they feel about the quality? How do they feel about the speed? How do they feel about the cost or the value for the cost that you’re offering? Do they feel good about it? Do they feel bad about it? Is it getting better? Is it getting worse? How do they rate you? – and pay attention to that stuff. As Peter Drucker says what gets measured gets managed, and so, measure that stuff.

Also, the revenue side - you may be able to bring in revenue from your IT organization and, once again, not all IT organizations are set up for this, but even if you’re not, I want you to make that box a little larger and say, ‘Have we created something that brings value outside of these four walls of our organization? If so, can we package that and sell it? Can we sell it as intellectual property? Can we sell it as a piece of software? Can we sell it in cooperation with a third party organization?’ You know, I’ve done all three of these things for organizations. I’ve worked from an IT organization that used to have zero revenue coming.

So, if you’re going to run it like a business, think about it like a business. You have revenues. You have expenses. You have ROI. You have customers that need to be satisfied. You have KPIs that you’re managing and I would express that a lot of CIOs do a great job of managing IT’s KPIs. Like the amount of pings that servers are getting, the network activity, the users that are utilizing a particular piece of software over time – that’s great. Continue to do that, but also step outside of the four walls of IT and say, ‘How do customers feel about it?’ Engage and report that.

If we put out a new customer report, for example, are they utilizing it? How are they utilizing it? Did we build the right thing? Because if they’re not utilizing it, we need to go and revamp it or ask them if it’s working properly. Done right, you can anticipate what problems there are.

So, I would say that when we talk about running it as a business, look at the revenues, look at the expenses, look at the ROI, and look at your customer satisfaction.

Henry: It sounds like you would probably agree a lot of IT organizations have developed a poor reputation. What should IT’s reputation be?

Dewayne: IT’s reputation should be the champion for the business, the engine for the business. If you walk by a Ferrari, that Ferrari is a good-looking machine. It’s just great. Its’s fun to drive. It hugs the road. They’re just great vehicles, but if you take the engine out of any of those vehicles, it will become a big piece of metal. It’s the engine that makes this thing run. But you don’t even pay attention to it until it doesn’t work, but that engine is the thing that makes that car go. IT organizations should be that for your entire company. You are the engine that makes that thing go.

Imagine what Amazon would be without an IT organization. You think about all the things that they do that you don’t even pay attention to. I could go on Amazon and search for something on my computer, and then I can grab my phone and pull up Facebook and the same thing that I searched for is in my Facebook feed. Somebody has to make that happen. Someone had to have the ingenuity to say, ‘We can do this. We can make it happen.’

Once again, you don’t see them. You don’t even know who the CIO is, but they’re there and they’re the engine of the organization. We don’t pay attention to it until it stops working, but that’s what IT organizations should be for the company. They should be the engine that keeps that company purring, and it should be so seamless that people don’t realize it’s there until they go looking.

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