CEO Geeks Rule

Dan Morrill (Security Project Manager)

If you ever doubted it, then you need to go over to the Business Week article that talks about the early integration of IT in business, and how CEO's who get it, who label themselves as computer geeks get their businesses growing faster than folks who do not.

While companies have many strategies to make them grow, in many of the companies that we have seen, IT is still off in its own corner, and not really integrated into the business. Business asks for things, IT says no, security says no, rather than try to make some kind of process where the decision is about risk management, rather than simply no.

Yes-73% of the "total geeks" reported double-digit average annual growth in their businesses over the past five years. Close to half-48%-of "total geeks" also reported that their businesses reached the 100-employee milestone within five years of launch, compared to one-third of all survey respondents.
We also found it was important to integrate IT into a company's business strategy early. The survey found that, while 98% of respondents said their company had a defined IT strategy as a small business, those who viewed IT as a "strategic or competitive resource" tended to grow faster than CEOs who said they "spent just enough" to ensure that employees could do their jobs. Plus, 18% of respondents said that "not integrating technology into our business strategy sooner" was their biggest IT mistake over the years. Source: Business Week

Many management articles will always say that people need to keep IT in the business, and that business should be an active participant in IT, and IT should be an active participant in business. The ability to do so it widely debated, but has a simple outcome. If you want to have a better company, IT is a base resource, that must be leveraged to make better decisions, grow the company faster, and generally support the business.

There are few real studies that back up this assertion, so the new one quoted by business week should be on every manager's desk this morning. Especially if the IT department is estranged from the company. Something to think about, grow faster by incorporating IT better, or grow slower by letting IT be on its own in some small dark corner of the company.