IT Mission

For some organizations, formal Mission Statements are standard fare. Some organizations even go so far as to believe them, make them actionable and something that sheds light on where they need to go.

For IT in for-profit organizations, I think the Mission Statement can be neatly and succinctly captured - We make Money. Either directly or indirectly, the mission of every IT organization is to increase profits.

Sure you can add words to dress it up. You can include something that makes HR feel warm and fuzzy like valuing employees (or associates if you are in that kind of company). You can be sure it includes fashionable words like Innovation, Collaboration, other-ation. At the end though, it all boils down to making money whether you are publicly traded or privately held. Your raision d'etre is to participate in generating enough profit to meet the company's other goals. Being good corporate citizens, helping employees to earn a fair wage, and so on revolve around profit.....but this isn't an Economics blog, it's an IT Leadership blog.

Too many CIO's and IT executives wonder why they "don't have a seat at the table" or are in some other way marginalized by the rest of the business. Every executive I know of has a set of financial goals. Ask yourself a couple of questions:

• Do you know what your partners on the business side are tasked with achieving? If not, you are behind already.
  
• Can you clearly and in business terms express how IT is (or isn't) helping meet those goals? Can your business partner??
  
• What are your ideas for helping to grow the business? What does IT need to do? How much risk is there? Will something else have to give?
  
• Are you meeting your current obligations? What do the business leaders think about IT's performance? Honestly? If you aren't running the existing portfolio of IT products and services with excellence it's highly unlikely you'll get to talk about anything else. Don't waste your time and that of your partners. Fix things. If the trains don't run on time, you don't get to talk about new and exciting strategic projects. At the risk of mixing metaphors, your political capital account is at risk of being overdrawn.

The further up the org chart you are talking, the less important are the bits-and-bytes, speeds-and-feeds of technology. What matters are things like revenue, customer retention and satisfaction, quality, etc. Your technology strategy, tactics and performance should be wrapped with those business metrics. Your business partners don't really care about the how's of technology, they care about the impacts on their profitability. In Board presentations, I never use technology jargon, instead I use the same language and jargon that you'd hear from the heads of Sales, Marketing and Finance.

When you can clearly define the impact on the bottom-line of that next project, you'll find your opinions are being sought out by those who need that project.