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IT Leadership: The People Domain
1. The People Domain
Jeremy Hobbs
Superintendent of HR, IT and Facilities
Upper Canada District School Board
@jeremychobbs
Jeremy.hobbs@ucdsb.on.ca
2. What Is an Organization?
• A social unit of people that is structured and managed
to meet a need or to pursue collective goals. All
organizations have a management structure that
determines relationships between the
different activities and the members, and subdivides
and assigns roles, responsibilities, and authority to
carry out different tasks. Organizations
are open systems--they affect and are affected by
their environment.
3. The Scope of the “People” Domain
The IT
Audience
Staff Consumers Stakeholders
Creating the
behaviours
necessary to
create and
sustain
‘customer’ value
Ensuring
consumption and
positive
perception of the
services
Understanding
and support
necessary to
initiate and
sustain the
agenda
4. Agenda
• The importance of strategy in shaping your approach to people
• Building a strategy for staff
• Designing with the consumer in mind
• Winning over stakeholders
6. First,What Is Strategy?
1. A method or plan chosen to bring about a desired future, such as
achievement of a goal or solution to a problem.
2. The art and science of planning and marshalling resources for their most
efficient and effective use.The term is derived from the Greek word for
generalship or leading an army. See also tactics.
7. Starting with Strategic Focus
Leadership
• Develops deep understanding of the external and internal environment
• Facilitates development of value proposition consistent with needs of the
organization
• Sets conditions by which the IT department can sustainably deliver the value
Value Creation
Engine
• The arrangement of people, technology, processes and resources necessary to
generate the value
Value
• The ultimate contribution the department makes to helping the wider organization
achieve its mission
What do I have to accomplish and under what conditions?
What is the best way to organize what I have, to achieve what I need to?
How does what we do serve the wider organization?
8. Upper Canada’s ITValue
We connect people to knowledge
Improved Decision Quality
Improved Operational
Efficiency
New and Better Learning
Experiences
Broader and Deeper Social
Connections
This has remained the same for 11 years, even as technology and
attitudes toward technology have shifted dramatically!
Why? Because the mission is not to deploy technology, but to enable
specific behaviour and attitude changes with technology
9. Making Dessert
• As IT organizations in public education, our missions are
similar, but our local context varies enough that strategy
is not necessarily the same
• It’s like we are all asked to make dessert, but the fact we
have different ingredients and tools makes it hard to
make the same dessert the same way.This is why we
need strategy.
• What are some of the local factors that might influence
your approach to achieving the mission locally?
10. Example Considerations for Strategy
• Size of board and IT staff
• Technology footprint
• External technology trends
• Local labour market
• Board and departmental trends
• Instructional strategy
• Organizational Structure
• Unions
• Culture
• Skill sets
• Reputation
• Make / buy posture
• Scope of function (academic / admin etc)
12. Why Lead with Staff
• Regardless of all the talk about “change management”, the single biggest
factor in your ability to effect change is the extent to which you are able to
successfully execute and sustain initiatives that are valuable to the
organization.
• Your staff are the single biggest means of accomplishing this.
16. WhenYou Don’t GetWhatYouWant…
• People come to the role with personal
issues, feelings – they all are at
different ‘places’. Ignore these issues
at your own peril
• When you are dissatisfied with what
you are getting out of people:
• Try to diagnose the root cause
• Ask what your role has been in the
problem and how you can help that
person deliver what you need.
Capacity
Competence
Compliance
17. Your Organization Must be Consciously Designed
• What are some of the considerations you would factor into your design of an
organization that is intended to sustainably and efficiently deliver IT value
over the long term?
18. Example Organizational Considerations
• What is my technology strategy?
• Functional vs Process orientation
• Management span of control and supervision relationships
• Responsibility for resources
• Overlap and holes
• Labour market
• Technical and Non technical competencies
• Performance management systems
• Compensation and reward systems
• Growth and development systems
• Work systems (eg project management, budget management, etc)
19. • “An implication of viewing the organization as a social system is that
managers need to make careful use of signals (clear and explicit messages),
symbols (actions that reinforce the signals) and “reward systems” to
manage the reengineering”
Hammer and Champy, 1999.
21. A Few Core Beliefs…
• The purpose of providing people a tool is to enable them to do something they
couldn’t before.
• Our work in IT is not done when the tech gets rolled out, it is when the consumer
behavior change has been realized at scale
• If we provide a tool and people can’t or won’t use it, we have failed the
organization
• The challenge in IT is often people don’t know they want something until after they
have begun to use it!
22. “A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the
choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a
predictable way without forbidding any options or
significantly changing their economic incentives.”
“Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. There the authorities
have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal.
It seems that men usually do not pay much attention to
where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess, but if
they see a target, attention and therefore accuracy are
much increased.”
23. • How can you use the concept of a Nudge in designing and rolling out
technology so that people don’t have to be begged, told, coerced or
threatened into using it?
24. Examples ofWaysTo Nudge People withTech
• Design for zero training and zero communication
• Fewer technology stacks
• Reuse skills
• Fewer passwords
• Don’t make people look
• Make it fun
• Select projects that appeal to self interest
• Understand human behavior and what creates interest and commitment
• Brand
• Choice
• Immediacy
• Leverage the default – habits that are already ingrained
25. Common PeopleTraps for IT Projects
• We need to consult
• We need a bigger guiding committee
• We need focus groups
• We need to do a pilot
• We need to provide a lot more training
29. Who AreYour Stakeholders?
• Not necessarily the consumer or producer of a service, but people/ ‘on the side’ who wield influence in
your work
• Can be
• Trustees
• Chief Superintendent, Superintendent, Director, CFO
• Influential managers, principals, teachers
• Union presidents and students
• Influential parents and community members
• Suppliers
• You need to proactively understand how all these groups can help or hinder your agenda and
‘manage’ them accordingly
30. Organizational Power
• Think of your power is a bank account that you make deposits to and
that you spend from
• This happens nearly imperceptibly with every daily action and decision
• How do you make deposits
• Wins
• Personal relationships
• Trades
• How do you spend
• Failure to meet expectations
• Invoking compliance measures like authority
• Breach of trust
32. Managing Up and Out
• You have enormous influence on the way you, your initiatives, your
department and your value are perceived
• This requires not just managing down but consciously managing your brand
and your power ‘up and out’
• What are some strategies you might employ to ensure your department is
positively received by trustees? by your boss? by the community?
33. The People Domain: Bottom Line
• In every IT system you roll out and every organizational structure and process
you put in place, your job starts with defining the human behavior you are
seeking and it ends when that behavior comes to fruition.
• People are at once the biggest enabler of achieving this value but also the
biggest barrier to realizing it.
• Start with focusing on the substance – doing things of value reliably and
sustainably.
• The leader is a designer – at any time, the way you have deployed your people,
processes, technology and resources must be consistent with your intended value
and the prevailing conditions.
Editor's Notes
A few points
Research tells us that it takes up to two years for staff to achieve peak productivity in a new role – assuming they are technically qualified to perform that role to begin with
Exacerbated by speed of technology evolution
The longer people stay, the more you have to attend to maintaining engagement
Speak to evolution of IT – we are now past the era where consumers use what we provide and now want us to provide what they use.
Your “brand” and that of your department is enormously important to your value delivery strategy
The point is at any time you have ‘power’ to make change.
Power comes in different types and when you invoke different types, you get different types of change.
Ties back to theory x/y and maslow’s hierarchy – is true whether with staff, stakeholders or consumers
