What if... the sales and marketing director was put in charge of IT?

Who should be responsible for IT? How about the sales and marketing boss - or, hold on a minute, the head of IT? Dale Vile gets hypothetical.

IT directors and managers are useless. More and more evidence is being accumulated by journalists to support this view. The recent silicon.com article Clueless IT managers their own worst enemy (http://www.silicon.com/a51550 ) illustrates the point. IT managers don't know how many PCs are hooked up to their networks, they are poised to throw money at the wrong projects and they have generally lost control of their companies' IT strategies.

What a shower!

We clearly need to find someone else to take over. But who would that be?

One candidate is the sales and marketing director. They are always complaining they don't have enough budget, so let's give them that big juicy IT budget and see how they get on.

On the upside, a bit of the 'results oriented' sales and marketing culture wouldn't go amiss in IT. If a sales rep doesn't deliver the goods, they get fired. Why shouldn't it be the same with IT systems? Imagine the inquisition as the new boss flexes his or her muscles:

"So you're telling me that you spent £4m on implementing an ERP system and the thing you're most proud of is that the business is now finally running as smoothly as it was before!

"Why, exactly, are we spending so much maintaining three separate systems that all do the same thing? I don't have three sales reps trying to sell the same product to the same customer - they couldn't all deliver results!

"Why we are planning to upgrade 800 desktops to Windows XP?

"From now on, we are going to set targets for IT systems and review their performance regularly against those targets. If they don't perform, we get rid of them and find a replacement - we can't afford to carry losers!"

Few would argue an injection of this type would benefit the average IT department. Many organisations do a great job of justifying IT projects up front but seldom monitor the performance of systems against the original objectives on an ongoing basis. Dead wood therefore accumulates over time. What makes matters worse is that distinguishing dead wood from good wood is hard if there are no monitoring processes and review procedures in place.

The fly in the ointment with the pure results oriented approach, however, is infrastructure. Networks, servers, help desks and so on are one step removed from the business benefit that is delivered by an application. It can therefore be difficult to relate investment to return in any specific and coherent way.

Ironically, though, it is often infrastructure that is the most effectively monitored. Perhaps this is why IT departments highlight their spending plans in this area when asked. It is something they can measure and get their arms around, at least in technical performance terms.

But a more effective way of managing priorities in these difficult times is to challenge continuously how well specific applications are delivering business benefit and use this information as part of the decision making process.

It might, for example, be better to axe a bandwidth-hungry application that is not delivering business benefit in preference to upgrading the network. Solve the capacity problem and save money into the bargain. This is a simplistic example but the point is achieving more of a result for less money is possible by thinking holistically rather than focussing on the immediate IT problem in isolation.

This need for holistic thinking brings us to the downside of putting our new IT boss into place. Let me state it one more time: a sales and marketing director with full authority over the IT department and its budget! This is a Siebel sales rep's dream come true. Someone who will see the value of a state-of-the-art CRM/ebusiness system without asking all of those awkward questions about integration, maintenance and support! "Come to Daddy!"

Putting the head of a specific business function in charge of IT is clearly not the answer. That would be a sure way of skewing things towards one area at the expense of others. As IT now underpins pretty much everything from an operational perspective, a more balanced approach is required. The reality is that there are only three people in most organisations that can take such a balanced view across all business functions - the CEO, CIO and CFO (The latter is more concerned with control rather than visioning and developing the business.)

This makes the CIO and his department particularly key. Very often, for example, opportunities for improvement of business processes across functional divisions only come to light when IT starts looking at a technical integration requirement. This is an indirect benefit of IT that is not often recognised.

Taking positive aspects like this into consideration when assessing the performance of IT departments is important. We should also recognise that managing a critical horizontal service that cuts across the entire business (and its politics) is actually extremely hard and that it would not be easy to find replacements for many of the CIOs and IT managers out there. It can be a thankless job at times and creating the view that they are all incompetent is not helpful.

So should we back off giving IT management so much grief?

The answer is no. We should continue to challenge the IT management community on how well they have a grip on the basics as many are losing sight of the wood for the trees. Criticism is therefore healthy and necessary, provided it remains fair.

As importantly, we should also be pushing IT departments to become smarter about how they manage the delivery of business benefit and articulate what they are doing in business terms. Compared to keeping track of the exact number of PCs hooked up to a network, this is a much more fundamental issue.

What are your thoughts? If you want to respond to this article post a Reader Comment below, or email editorial@silicon.com to let us know what you'd like to see Dale cover in future 'What if...' columns.

**Dale Vile is service director at analyst house Quocirca. His C.V. boasts years at Nortel Networks, Bloor Research, SAP and Sybase and his job now involves working with vendors and users wanting to tap the business benefits of technology. For more information see: http://www.quocirca.com

Past columns:
What if... 3G was available right now?
http://www.silicon.com/a51156
What if... teachers were replaced by computers?
http://www.silicon.com/a50842
What if... Santa believed everything vendors told him?
http://www.silicon.com/a50007
What if... Amazon.com has bumper sales this Christmas?
http://www.silicon.com/a49685