CIOs continue to be under pressure to do more with less as businesses and governments look to reduce costs. With shrinking workforces and almost endless opportunities to leverage technology for the organization’s goals, what’s a CIO to do? Harnessing the creative energy of people outside of the CIO’s immediate circle of influence can help build out the capabilities to transform how you do business.
Set the Vision
How do you get hundreds or thousands of people to help you reach your goals? Clearly, reaching out individually to each and every person would be prohibitively time consuming. And then, how to manage the many questions that arise along the way? Setting a well-defined vision establishes the direction for the extended community and the common goal that the community is working towards. In the face of uncertainty, the community can return to the vision and independently perform the course corrections to arrive upon the goal. This frees the CIO from having to intervene with every individual project while allowing the adoption of the collaborative efforts of the community.
The Heath Brothers remind us what makes a good vision statement and those that perhaps are less compelling. I would simply note the advice of a past mentor of mine passed along, namely that “there’s a fine line between Vision and Hallucination.” Articulate your vision with care and the community will follow.
Empower the Community
Whether the CIO has a large distributed organization, works with a small team with relationships though peer associations or has a small team but wants to leverage the skills in the community, empowering the extended community broadens the reach of the technology shop. Many organizations have established cultures where people will actively work to shut down useful projects that are perceived to encroach on their particular turf, often spending more time to block the work than growing the capability. Not only is this negativity counterproductive, it creates a toxic environment and dampens creativity. A preferred approach is to acknowledge the work being done by others and either hitching your project to that wagon, or accelerating the project you’re working on so that the other team decides to follow you.
Having been part of both activities, I can honestly say that the latter is more constructive. After all, everyone is working towards the same vision and goals. This distributed empowerment is at the heart of the Open Government work and the associated collaborative community development. Perhaps the externally focused empowerment can be further embraced internally to allow the creativity of one group to be adopted by the others within the organization.
