IT Transformation: When is a Company Ready?

[MichaelDortch]

I love those jokes that start out by asking, "How many [fill in the blank here] does it take to change a light bulb?" And my favorite variation on this theme goes like this.

Q: How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Only one — but the light bulb has to really want to change.

We at ServiceNow are, as you might well imagine, big on IT transformation. But how best to determine if a company — maybe your company — is ready to begin the transformation journey?

I've been traveling and working a lot recently with our talented and experienced Director of Sales Training and Enablement, Steve Maxwell. Thanks to that collaboration, I can share with you some clues to help you to determine if a company — maybe your company — is or is not ready.

To begin, here are three questions Steve trains our salespeople and partners to ask of every prospect. These questions are equally valuable to you in your efforts to determine company readiness for IT transformation.
1. What operational IT problems do they have today?
2. How is IT aligned (or not aligned) to the business?
3. Is IT inhibiting business development?

Further, there are seven steps that our salespeople and partners find incredibly useful in evaluating a prospective client's readiness for transformation.
1. Determine process-level maturity
2. Identify and quantify pain
3. Determine business vision
4. Validate technology readiness
5. Build (and test) champions
6. Validate capability to change
7. Win the hearts and minds of technical team

That seventh step is often one of the most important, and one of the most challenging. You may identify technical team members who view IT transformation as a threat to their perceived power or influence, rather than as an opportunity to increase those things. Such people can be serious, sometimes insurmountable obstacles to the transformation journey. You and your interpersonal political skills, as well as those of your identified champions, may be challenged to their limits to convert these skeptics. But it's absolutely essential that you do so — or somehow eliminate their influence on the transformation process. Which I submit is far more challenging and risky than figuring out how to get them on your side.

Now that you know some criteria for evaluating a company's readiness for IT transformation, you're probably wondering how best to acquire the information you need. Easiest thing in the world. Only two steps involved.
1. Ask questions.
2. Listen carefully to the answers you get.

As Steve likes to point out in his training presentations, world-class negotiators obtain three times the information that those outside of their class do, and give up half as much. My personal experience backs that up. Good analysts, consultants, and salespeople ask two to three times the number of information-gathering questions asked by their less-than-stellar colleagues. Put another way, you have one mouth, but two ears. Use them proportionally.

This is not just a theoretical exercise. Transformation of IT at an enterprise is a profound, pervasive effort. It has real immediate and sustained benefit, but only if it works. And it only works if those behind it have a clear, complete vision of the current situation, what's really at stake, who the key stakeholders are, and what they care about most. Borrowing some of the most effective qualification processes used by our most successful salespeople and partners can really help you to jump-start your information-gathering efforts, and your journey towards IT transformation.

Feel free to contact me if you'd like to discuss any or all of this in more detail. I'd love to know your thoughts on this, and your own experiences with this critical journey.