View From Stanford: Creating IT 'tribes'

On a recent trip to Silicon Valley, silicon.com analysis and reports editor Sylvia Carr spoke to the IT leadership at Stanford University about their greatest concerns - including management and offshoring. Here is the second instalment of a two-part series. (Read part one.)

Hardly a month goes by without media scrutiny of the progress and viability of major IT projects. Most recently the focus has been on the NHS' £6.2bn IT modernisation project and the national ID cards rollout.

What does this say about the quality of management in IT departments? What's going wrong and how can CIOs and IT directors do a better job?

From his vantage point at Silicon Valley's leading university, William Clebsch, executive director of IT services at Stanford, offers some insight.

The manager of a 300-person staff and an $80m annual budget, he talks about starting out in finance, the pitfalls of managing mega-projects and how to create IT leadership in a organisation.

silicon.com: Your background is in the business aspects of IT - as opposed to the technology - and in financial modelling for IT. How does that prepare you for an IT director or CIO-level position?
Clebsch: I wouldn't classify myself as a [traditional] finance guy. But I do believe that being in finance is a great gift. The thing you get with finance is you know more about all the parts of the business than almost anybody. You're not deep in any one of them but you know all of them and you know how they interact. So I think it's great training.

Do you think in today's IT world there's great benefit in having technical expertise, or is it now more important to be a good manager or businessperson?
I think [IT] is more and more about business and more and more about communication.

When I began at Stanford 20 years ago, people represented about 25 to 30 per cent of my budget. Now people account for 60 to 70 per cent of my budget. That's a sea change.

Why do you think that happened?
We are a young industry. As we're maturing, we're maturing in a way that says, 'Guess what? The term "knowledge worker" really does mean something.' The information revolution has happened. And so it's more about people now than machines. Once you have an organisation that's more about people than machines, you need a different kind of leadership.

Just that fundamental change [in the percentage of budget spent on people] means I need a lot more people skills in the leadership of my organisation than I used to. It was natural to have a lot of technical skills when that was 70 per cent of your budget.

But you still need technical knowledge too?
[IT leadership] with no technical knowledge is not a good thing. You've got to have enough technical knowledge to know when people are buffaloing you.

Do you mean vendors, or people outside your organisation?
Yes but also your own staff. Or technical staff from another part of your company. Or if your management has a little technical knowledge.

How do you keep up on technical issues?
I spend a lot of time with my chief technologist who really does know a lot about the technical side. It's really important that he reports directly to me and that I am in constant communication with him because I have to constantly challenge my organisation to be innovative and not be stuck in our ways forever.

But I also have to listen to the practical side of the house and say, 'What's practical?'

So [it's about] steering that middle ground. I think it pays not to be too technical, or too wedded to technology, because there's a lot of religion in technology.

What are IT people like to manage?
These are really, really creative people, very smart, very talented, and it takes a lot of management skill to guide them - because you both have to listen to them because they're smarter than you about the technical side, and on the other hand you need management to pull people and groups together and challenge them.

What are the greatest challenges in IT management?
There's a problem with many organisations that they have silos and people throw rocks at each other and don't play nice - and overcoming that is a huge leadership challenge.

There's a question I've really been wrestling with for a while and that is, 'How big can a tribe be?' How big a tribe can you build where everyone feels like they're part of the same thing?

How do you deal with these challenges? Can you describe your management style?
I believe the fundamental key to being successful in IT is the people, not the technology. Technology's easy, people are hard. I spend a lot of my time working on the basic people skills just like some people might work on getting their code right in a certain kind of process.

I spend a lot of my time talking about... what does accountability really mean? What happens when you make a commitment - a personal commitment or a commitment on the part of the organisation?

I try to talk to people about how we work together because I really think the main part is clarity. We all go out and we think we've made a commitment and we haven't.

So you try to make people better communicators?
The work I do is trying to help people become more precise with their language, understanding that when you make a commitment it has three aspects - it has its content, it has date and time and it has conditions of satisfaction.

A lot of the way technology gets isolated in a business is with irresponsible language.

How do you create good managers?
One thing we do is an institutionalised mentoring programme. Everyone who's at a certain level, whether they're a senior technical person or a senior manager, they must be mentoring someone.

Another way you develop people is by what someone on my staff calls 'extreme delegation'. IT is very hierarchical and it's a classic industry of micromanagement. We really end up stifling the creativity in our shops and we end up limiting our output because there are so many funnels. You really develop people by giving them a chance to fail.

Delegation is a big problem in IT. The smart people at the top seem to figure it's easier to do it themselves, and don't end up growing an organisation.

Would you say there's a lack of good leadership and management in IT? In the UK we hear a lot about big IT project failures. The £6bn NHS IT programme is being talked about in those terms by some.
I don't know that it plagues our industry more than others. But we have very visible projects. So the failures in IT are very public kinds of failures.

But think about what we were talking about with tribes. How do you build a tribe around a £6bn project? Think about how many people that is, think about how much money that is.

And I will posit to you that historically, as human beings, it often seems that the only time we can form tribes at that level is at war, when there's a real sense of a common enemy. The challenge of IT leadership is to change that.