Focus

To share a bit of my philosophy on what makes a successful technical leader, I believe it boils down to four main areas of concern: strategic vision, people leadership, system architecture, and process management. Advanced competency in each of these is necessary, but also understanding that sacrifices made in any one of these areas during times of pressure, will result in a faulty foundation and eventually topple the entire program.


Strategic Vision

This first pillar generally speaks to the core of the business. The more tightly the overall strategy aligns with technology, the more homogeneous and sustainable the solution will be. Forrester has baked this concept into its DNA by rebranding the IT department as “Business Technology”. It challenges developers, business analysts, product owners, etc to not simply respond to business demands, but to have a full and equal seat at the table. It is on all of us to believe in the direction of the company and bring forward the tools and strategies that will lead us to success. We certainly must deal with the nuts and bolts of running a business - networking, telephony, hardware, etc. but the truly successful technology department takes advantage of its unique skill-set to help define how the company can use emerging technologies to win the future. We can distill concepts like AI, data mining, SaaS, etc and show our business partners how to deploy them to meet our business goals.


People leadership

A dedicated, highly skilled team is the key to implementing or integrating any change in the organization. Any manager that fails to recognize that the people are the most important part of the job will never succeed in building high-performing teams. Empowering 100 people with aligned goals is exponentially more impactful than what any single individual can do by themselves. And helping illustrate that direct line between one team’s success and the company’s success federates the heavy lifting of driving company momentum.


Business success comes from ideas, and that creativity can (and should) come from everywhere. Too often in IT organizations we focus exclusively on the “what” of the project and neglect the “why”. When we expand on the conversation to educate our problem solvers on the strategy and vision of the company, we establish a culture of ownership and growth and federate the heavy lifting of growing the business down to the micro level of our everyday actions. The other side effect of this investment is we simultaneously groom the next wave of leaders in the organization.


System Architecture

I have served as both leader and implementer through the lifecycle of design, build and maintenance of many systems, encompassing corporate web and CRM systems along with all manner of system integrations. I believe in resilient, but ultimately portable system architecture. The infrastructure of the systems must be robust and extend to the middle distance planning horizon, while remaining malleable enough for the individual demands of lower level applications. The investment of architectural design of the infrastructure must therefore be more speculative than the just-in-time architecture. It demands pluggable pieces - cloud or on prem so the business applications can pivot quickly with the demand with their fast paced project pipelines. 


Process Management

The final piece to the high performing IT organization is process management. This spans concepts like 


Compared to the three previous areas discussed, process discipline can seem less critical as we tend to lean on the fact we have “smart people” who can just “get it done”. In reality, this is one of the most impactful areas as this defines the day to day of the team. Lack of clarity builds risk in our systems and wastes critical effort. The creativity and individual genius that we demand from our employees cannot be wasted on repeatable and mundane tasks. This decision fatigue as they navigate the chaos of ill-defined processes diminishes quality, job satisfaction, and company progress.