Tips for leading IT amid corporate change

The best of today's new-generation IT executives have learned to devote as many resources to communications as they do to servers, software and the network.

Erv Blythe is a perfect example. In leading a mainframe-migration project, the vice president for IT at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., threw out his old way of thinking and ushered in a leadership strategy that revolved around communicating with business constituents.

"That project had two starts; the first I didn't think was very good," he recalls. "It was managed like any project in the old mainframe perspective - you know: 'We're from IT, and we're here to help you.' I had to stop that way of thinking."

Realizing the project was too big to succeed on the basis of IT service agreements alone, he requested the participation of specific top-level businesspeople on the project team. When the university provost balked at giving up senior personnel to work on the project, Blythe responded, "If it doesn't hurt, then I named the wrong person."

Eventually, the human-resources and finance personnel he requested for the migration project took leaves of absence to work full time on the transition. Having business-unit leaders on the project team helped keep expectations in line with the realities of what the new technology infrastructure could provide, Blythe says.

Savvy IT leaders such as Blythe also understand it's important to attend to politics and perceptions, too. A project is really 80% driven by politics, 15% by the budget and only 5% by the technology, Blythe says, admitting to his previous belief that technology accounted for 90% of project decisions.

Beyond technology

Sometimes the biggest projects IT executives oversee aren't implementations of new systems but large organizational changes.

That's the situation of California's IT leaders, who in 2004 received a legislative mandate to consolidate the state's two large data centers and its Office of Network Services into a Department of Technology Services. This massive change will create an agency with a $300 million annual budget and affect how 800 people from three IT organizations do their jobs, says Bob Austin, now chief deputy director for the new department.

The IT execs knew they had a huge change-management issue on their hands, says Austin, who also is one of the leaders of a temporary Consolidation Management Office (CMO). Created in May 2005, the CMO is overseeing the transition, which is expected to be complete by July 2007.