Beliefs, behaviour, and outcomes are often core elements of culture

CIOs can change an IT culture afflicted by business limitations, but the process is more evolution than revolution. As one CIO said, “I can't walk downstairs and say 'OK, today we are Google' … You want to take the best of that [culture] and weave it in at the right pace for your organisation.”

To remediate a “culture of mediocrity,” CIOs should consider actively and consciously curating IT culture. To bring about lasting cultural change, Deloitte proposes that culture be deconstructed to its core elements: beliefs, behaviours, and outcomes. Many organisational cultures consist of commonly held beliefs that lead to certain behaviours and ultimately deliver specific outcomes.

The squeaky wheel principle

Cultural change thus requires CIOs to first discover and then reframe their organisations' embedded beliefs – a task that can be substantially more complicated and problematic than implementing new technologies.

In a large technology company's IT organisation, business demand outpaced IT capacity so significantly that the department was 18 months behind. Output was inconsistent, and IT had developed several customised tools to complete similar jobs for different business units. Business leaders were unhappy with IT's performance and viewed the department as a roadblock to business growth.

In this organisation, business and IT leaders operated in individual silos. Business leaders inflated project benefits and set unrealistic deadlines, and the IT team threw projects “over the wall” without any real collaboration or discussion. Even though IT worked diligently to meet the expectations of eight different business leaders, they did so without coordinating, prioritising, or holding anyone accountable for outcomes. As a result, the team almost always failed to meet business expectations.

Upon investigation, the IT team's corresponding outcomes and behaviours were traced to a deeply held cultural belief that the customer (in this case, the internal business unit) was always right. Over time, a belief rooted in good intentions led the IT team to accept all business requests and prioritise projects according to the “squeaky wheel” principle.

Changing to an efficient IT culture

Changing a cultural belief system is not usually a trivial undertaking – it can require creating a narrative that reinforces more desirable beliefs, behaviours, and outcomes. In another case, the CIO of a financial services company created a narrative to support the IT organisation's transformation from a back – office support group to a driving force in customer experience – and backed it up with actions such as:

• Mandating that IT leaders develop cross-functional teams involving marketing, operations, and sales organisations in every cus

tomer – facing project

• Encouraging and facilitating conversations across functions and businesses to understand customer needs

• Collaborating with IT and business leadership to reserve dedicated resources for technology projects

• Measuring and rewarding employees on business outcomes (changes in customer experience scores and customer retention rates) instead of project performance and uptime

• Holding the collective team accountable for outcomes These actions helped send a very strong message to the IT team and business units. The CIO created a belief system that helped establish IT as an equal partner with marketing in terms of customer experience ownership, which served as a foundation for customer – focused behaviours and outcomes for the whole IT organisation and set the stage for IT to function and be perceived as a true business partner.

Excerpt taken from the article “IT culture: From business limitation to competitive advantage”. For more information, please visit www.deloitte.com/mt/cio

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