I had dinner the other night with a few of my CIO Staff peers and a senior Intel fellow*. During dinner, the conversation evolved to a a discussion of the purpose of IT. We use the term Teachable Point of View (or TPOV) to communicate the salient or summarized message we want people to remember. The collecitive intelligence created a TPOV on the purpose of IT and I’d like to share our thoughts with you and get your feedback. Without begging, don’t be shy on this topic!

So, our TPOV about the purpose of IT is:

Automate tasks that are manual or labor intensive and redistribute employees to greater areas of need; improve productivity of the employees to generate better results; enable better decision making by consolidating information; and improve the profitability of the enterprise.

OK, so it is a little long! The definition started with the first section (efficiency and automation) and we kept adding, with comma’s, additional thoughts. We kept asking ourselves, “Are all of these necesarry and sufficient?” trying to understand if we had too many components, or not enough incorporated into this definition. After some debate we struggled with the priortiziation of the items but agreed all were significantly part of the purpose of IT.

If I think about my organization and role, I attempt to deliver all of these elements in my job. I’m focused on improving the utilization of our server assets and simplifying the enviornment so I need fewer ‘feet on the street’ to run the assets. By moving employees into a role that “creates” rather than “supports” we can innovate and add more value. All the while reducing cost (Capital and Deprecation for servers and data centers) and improving our margin.

We also have a team focused on deploying Platform Lifecycle Management capabilities that improve the productivity of the design leaders so they have information to make better decisions on platform tradeoffs, keeping the market informed so meet our commitments. The positive impact of my IT efforts alone is hundreds of millions of dollars from cost avoidance and time to market results.

My peers had similiar experiences for their customer/stakeholders. Do you as well? How would you modify the purpose?

So what do you think the purpose of IT is?

Good Computing,Marty

(*Note: The “Fellow” category is attributed to employees who have achieved outstanding technical results for the company.)

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