If your IT organization believes that it is somehow entitled to your company’s IT business, then the era of your organization's decline and decay has begun.
It is a behavioral fact of organizational life that the people your IT organization serves can go anywhere to get their IT needs met. And policies and internal controls won’t stop the motivated IT customer. They may be overt or covert about it, but your customers don’t need your IT organization to get their IT work done. Frankly, even if policies and internal controls did work, do you really want to be an IT vendor of force; wouldn’t you prefer to be the IT vendor of preference?
The truth is that your IT organization competes for your customers’ IT business with every other IT provider out there. You need to run your IT organization like it is your own business. You need to compete for your customers’ IT business. You don’t want to just meet or exceed your customers’ expectations; you want to create customer expectations to which any would-be competitor must respond. You need to create your own competitive advantage.
You may be an IT executive who is unhappy with your organization’s contributions, or how IT is valued, and you see the need to change course.
You may be a middle or front line IT manager who is simply seeking to improve the performance of your team.
You may be an IT program or project manager who is dealing with the subtle and nuanced kind of organizational change that every project requires to be successful.
Whatever your area of responsibility, break through performance begins with break through thinking, and every significant break through is actually a "break-with." Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible. All significant progress—the necessary break-with—depends on your ability to lead your organization into the prevailing winds.
Windward Leadership offers a number of distinctive IT management consulting services to help you cultivate competitive advantage. We can help you become your company’s IT vendor of preference.
Check out Windward's advantage creating consulting services:
IT Operational Planning & Execution
Whole System Organizational Transformation:
IT Program & Project Leadership
Reality Driven System Evaluation (RDSE) Methodology
Generational Planning & Release Management (GPRM) Model for Shared Software
We also do Keynote Speaking.
And don’t forget to check out Jim Ruprecht’s thoughtful, pragmatic, and sometimes irreverent book about successfully leading an organization through change: Windward Leadership: Taking Your Organization into the Prevailing Winds and Political Seas
