The Ugly Baby

If he was your baby, you would find him beautiful. Even when others point out your baby’s blemishes, you would truly believe that he is beautiful. Humans are remarkably subjective and creative to be able to rationalize the information they are receiving from their limbic brain. When you have as deep and personal a relationship and huge “investment” like a parent has, your Paleomammalian Brain decides and your Prefrontal Cortex rationalizes your perspective. Just like the man who mistook his wife for a hat and tried to put her on his head.

How pretty is your IT organization in the eyes of the IT customers?

Like most IT managers, you probably started your career directly dealing with IT technologies. Test yourself. Do you understand this?

“1f U c@n r3@d 7h1s, U R @ g33k!“ 

If the answer is yes, your IT customer’s perception is likely to be different than yours.

How can you get a more realistic picture of your baby? Here are a few ideas:

• Shared custodianship of the baby, having a  good Governance Board to provide feedback:
  • What is working/not working
  • What is  important/not important
• Cross-pollination, moving people between Business and IT
• Avant-garde no-limits brain storming sessions with your business partners
• External feedback and benchmarking
• Listening to the new people in the organization who haven’t developed neural adaptation yet
• Alignment of the baby with external beauty standards (business mission and vision)
• CIO comes from the business side

When in the office on Monday, draft a picture of your IT Baby as you know it. Then visit your business partners and ask them if they see the baby the same way. Ask them to sponsor a strong IT Governance Board and share the responsibility with you to doll up the baby.