IT culture and the organisation’s mission

IT culture: From business limitation to competitive advantage

An organisation's culture – the behaviour and values that drive the way work is done – can have a major impact on business performance, customer experience, and talent engagement. A global survey of C– suite executives showed that more than two–thirds (69 percent) believe company culture has a critically important impact on their organisation's ability to realise its mission and vision.

IT culture is an often-overlooked secret weapon. A vibrant and agile culture can deliver a competitive advantage that allows IT to transform operations, strategy, and performance; a stagnant or chaotic culture can limit a business's ability to achieve critical goals. Forty-five percent of CIOs surveyed in Deloitte's 2020 Global CIO Survey say that a high-performing IT culture is essential to their success – yet less than a quarter (22 percent) describe their current organisational capabilities in this area as leading or excellent.

In this paper, we discuss the many cultural challenges that CIOs face and propose the use of a cultural change model that allows them to help improve cultural outcomes. Through our global CIO survey and CIO interviews, we identify three primary types of healthy IT cultures that CIOs can curate within their organisations to help deliver competitive advantage to their businesses. Finally, we describe the characteristics of high-performing IT cultures.

What's the matter with IT culture?

As IT teams grapple with business operations and strategy, many unique cultural challenges arise. CIOs we interviewed told us that their IT teams are too often:

• Reactive: The rapidly changing business and technology landscape can put IT teams in a near-constant reactive state, with success measured by tactical terms such as the ability to execute on time and under budget. M&A, divestitures, technology innovations, and other business and organisational disruptions can reinforce reactive IT cultures.

• Siloed: Organisational misalignment, governance gaps, and conflicting business agendas often create a chasm between business needs and IT delivery. A historical tendency to value solo IT heroics and technical competency can deemphasise collaboration and teamwork, often resulting in projects with little to no collaboration or feedback from business counterparts. Silos can also exist within IT. For example, software developers may write code, build an app, and “throw it over the wall” to testing and production teams who know very little or nothing about the app.

• Inflexible: As a back-office partner with decades of responsibility for creating and maintaining missioncritical business systems and applications, many IT teams take pride in their focus on reliability and resilience. This can mean that the IT organisation is able to build solid, powerful tanks but struggles to develop sleek, speedy race cars. Many teams are driven by over-engineered, unwieldy processes and long development cycles, which can lead to frustration among their business peers.

When these qualities become entrenched in an IT organisation, they can lead to what one CIO described as a “culture of mediocrity.”4 Leaders and employees may be reluctant to make difficult decisions, act quickly, think creatively, or take risks.

Excerpt taken from the article

“IT culture: From business limitation to competitive advantage”.

For more information, please visit www.deloitte.com/mt/cio