IT Strategy Matters: Paper is not the best material from which to make hotel room walls!

Welcome to the 5th ‘IT Strategy Matters’ newsletter. I’m delighted that you are on this journey with me. In this edition, I’ll be creating a tenuous analogy between hotel room walls and IT strategy by focusing on the user experience.  

I’m conducting some research. If you have not done so already, please help me by sharing your views in the IT Strategy Matters survey at https://forms.office.com/e/MDZam3JjXN 

It's anonymous, but if you leave your details, I'll let you know how your answers compare to your peers.  

I believe that IT strategy matters! And what matters is how IT leaders and team members develop and deliver valuable strategies, how they work effectively with business leaders and end-users to do so. 

So, whether you are an IT leader, IT professional, business leader or a user of IT services your opinion matters! 

Thank you for contributing to my research. Your input is valuable and much appreciated. 

 Paper is not the best material from which to make hotel room walls. And yet so many architects and builders seem to think it is!  

I was reminded of this fact during a recent stay in a hotel which shall remain nameless. It was a great hotel with wonderful service, good food, and some great facilities. Unfortunately, I could hear everything that was happening in the neighbouring rooms! 

They just didn’t think carefully enough about the user experience that this was going to create... 

As I lay awake, listening to my neighbour’s snoring, I started to think about how often we really question what we are building our IT strategies and solutions from, or whether we reach for the nearest possible solution that will do, without thinking what the implications for the user experience will be.  

User Experience Focus 

Sometimes we design IT solutions that will run autonomously. With the rapid expansion of AI capability now, such solutions look set to play an increasingly important role in our enterprise architecture. But most IT systems are still designed to be used by humans and it’s essential that we make the user experience as positive as possible so that the users use the solution and deliver the value to the organisation that was intended.  

The focus on user needs and the user experience is a thread which needs to run through the whole process of design, development and delivery of your IT strategy. Too often, the user is only engaged when the solution is ready for them to use, and they need to be trained how to do so. By then it’s way too late to cater to the users’ needs or change the fundamental user experience. Trainers end up having to explain to users why they must use a system or process, and apologising for the poor user experience, rather than exciting them about how good the new system will be.  

Core Components of IT Strategy 

I talked in a previous newsletter about the core components of an IT strategy: Who, What, When and Why. I think that these four core components need to be addressed at every one of four phases of development: 

Often, it will be necessary to iterate between two of these phases to get to the right solution, especially the Measure and Hypothesise phases. Sometimes, it will be necessary to iterate around the whole cycle several times until the final solution is implemented. 

And in each phase, we need to consider the Who, the What, the When and the Why. Among other things, the Who covers the user needs and the user experience.  

The Importance of the ‘Who’ 

Sadly, IT too often remains distinct and disengaged from the business and the users. Whether it’s a lack of common language, lack of shared experience, or natural character traits, but IT professionals still tend to hide in the corner or the basement, running the technical ‘department of no’. Instead, I passionately believe that they should be out in the business, understanding the needs and problems of their colleagues and leveraging the considerable power that they wield, through the technology that they control, to make their lives better and jointly drive value for their organisation.  

Almost every organisation is now heavily reliant upon its IT systems. Probably all could be improved with better IT. So why is it often so hard to get ‘buy-in’ from the business or the users to do so? I believe that this is because they are not sufficiently involved in every stage of the process.  

It all starts with user needs: with IT understanding what works and what doesn’t for users and how IT can improve this. In the old days it was all about user needs as IT was there to mainly do what they wanted. Now, it’s a two-way discussion because users and the business are not always aware of what technology can do, and it is the responsibility of IT to drive a technology-led vision for the business as well as to implement the solutions that the business wants.  

The Measure, Research and Analyse phase is therefore all about capturing user and business needs, measuring the problems that currently exist and the opportunities that might. Measurement is key for the business case, but I’ll cover that in the next newsletter...  

From this point on, a core group of users will be essential to your strategy development and delivery. Beyond sharing their issues, needs and opportunities, the users should be part of the development and implementation of the solutions. Ultimately, they will be the users of the system, and its success will depend on how much they embrace the change, so involve them in the development of hypotheses, solutions and plans.  

A great way to do this is to create a group of subject matter experts (SMEs) from the user community. Involve them in key design decisions, and / or make them part of the governance of the work. They will likely still have day jobs, so you will need to do the work, but their engagement is essential to the creation of a valuable solution that will be of practical use.  

When it comes to implementation your engaged users will become your superstars! Successfully deploying a system to many users requires a change and adoption effort that is beyond the resources of most IT functions, even with the help of external consultants. Also, users learn best from their peers who understand the details of the job that they do and how the new IT solution will help.  

Your engaged users become your Champions, fanning out in a network across the organisation encouraging and helping their colleagues to learn how to use and to love the new system.  

If you take this approach, you will succeed because whatever you deliver will be focused on what the users and the business needs, not what you as IT want to give them! 

Mustafa Suleyman, Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft AI summed this up brilliantly in his recent blog post about new features in their Copilot AI assistant: 

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/10/01/an-ai-companion-for-everyone/ 

Suleyman said:  

“I truly believe we can create a calmer, more helpful and supportive era of technology, quite unlike anything we’ve seen before. Great technology experiences are about how you feel, not what’s under the hood. It should be about what you experience, not what we are building.” 

👏Well said Mustafa! 

Real-Life Example 

A final point from me on this subject is how amazing I find it when I see examples of this done well. I recently had the pleasure to meet and share a drink with a group of Nursing Information Officers from a couple of London university hospitals. I was fascinated by their role and comforted by the work that they are doing.  

All experienced nurses from different disciplines, their full-time role is now to focus on how technology can be better used within the hospital and care system to deliver better outcomes for patients and medical staff, and to reduce cost in the process. They are involved in every phase of the development and delivery of strategy and new systems to provide an expert and practical user and medical viewpoint. This not only makes them the champions of the ‘Who’ of the strategy, but also major contributors to the ‘What’ and the ‘Why’.  

Meeting these wonderful people significantly restored my faith in the NHS (the British health service) to deliver IT strategy and change effectively!🙏