Thursday, February 21, 2008

On a Clear Day You Can See The IT Infrastructure

Strategic Thinking or the Strategic Perspective has been around for millions of years. The strategic perspective has been defined as the ability to see the big picture. Big Picture and Vision have always been synonymous; both have been reduced to jargon for seeing the relationships between four things:

The Field of Play; the breadth and depth of the environment of behavior.
The Players; the mass of the team, an organization or a nation taking action.
The Possible Action; the process, path or course of action that may occur.
The Outcome Desired; the objective of a series of cause and effect connections between objects.

The formal science behind Strategic Thinking is known as Game Theory. In fact, most games are considered Strategic exercises. For example, to be successful in the game of Monopoly, players must use planning to acquire certain properties. Combined with a little luck from the dice, the results will provide a winning strategic advantage. Just like real life, it is rare that a player without a plan will win, entirely with the benefit provided by extraordinary luck.

In terms of breadth of perspective, Strategic Thinking is very similar to the structural perspective of Tactical Thinking; and modular perspective of Systems Thinking. In fact, Alfred Chandler is famous for identifying the critical relationship between Strategy, Structure and Systems. He is famous for coining the rule that Structure must always follow Strategy; and Systems must always follow Structure. This is the high-level formula for responsive organizations.

Unfortunately, undisciplined management philosophies have emerged that attempt to save time and money by combining Tactical and Execution into and Operational perspective. Tactical Thinking deals with developing a state of readiness or a state of being prepared to execute. Developing and testing capabilities and capacity. This is a practice made famous by theaters, guilds, craft unions, military organizations and professional sports; developing the capabilities of the organization through repetition and practice. In each and every one of these environments, it is not acceptable to learn your profession while performing it.

The profession of IT Service Management is no different from any other management science. Successful ITSM is comprised of a strategic perspective for direction, and tactical perspective for readiness and a systems perspective for delivery.

The big picture strategic perspective logically belongs to the head of the entire IT organization. IT service management is a strategic direction that is very different from the direction of systems management. Because the strategies are different, the organizational structures that enable the strategy will be different and organizational systems that enable the structure will be different. These are the basic principles of Alfred Chandler’s amazing work.

However, what happens when the culture has placed the systems or the structure in concrete and they are not flexible enough to adapt to different strategies. Upper management will announce bold new strategies design to transform the business organization. Wall Street analysts will see promise and anticipate improvement. Middle managers will receive the bold new strategies and attempt to fit them into a inflexible structure and unchangeable systems. In their mind, the only way to make it work together is to interpret the strategy so that it fits the existing organization and the existing systems.

In essence, middle management is choosing to adopt the old culture and adapt the strategy, instead of choosing to adopt the strategy and adapt the culture. The result is the consumption of resources and spending lots of money and producing no change.

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