IT leaders embrace the role of business change maker

They also need to embed with business stakeholders so much so that the lines blur. “You have to be an amazing collaborator almost to the point where you’re hanging out with business partners and you can’t tell the difference between their role and yours,” he explains.

One of Sanchez’s primary missions when he joined Qualcomm was modernizing siloed systems so that the wireless technology company could gain a better view of its customers, from their profiles to their sales journeys. Right off the bat, Sanchez assembled a team representing marketing, sales, engineering, and IT while establishing a shared mission and agile framework for collaborating as a consolidated group. The effort resulted in an enterprise data platform used to track users wherever they are in the product lifecycle.

“The key to success was ensuring we took a holistic view of the mission, providing everyone with a good, clean view of what we were doing and why we were doing it,” Sanchez says. “It wasn’t a sales tool; it was a Qualcomm tool.”

Sanchez juxtaposes this experience to another in his career where a major transformation project was almost derailed by the CEO due to lack of transparency. “Now I am super transparent about timelines and where there are issues,” he says. “It makes you vulnerable, but on the flip side, it allows you to be seen as a great business partner and collaborator.”

Change management best practices

Sanchez and his peers gave some additional change management advice:

Rethink organizational structure. Commscope’s Jonnala has designed the company’s IT organization so that team members are embedded directly in the business, ensuring they attend the same meetings, have a common understanding of pain points, and rally toward shared goals. Not only does this foster a shared commitment — it creates empathy that the group is in this together and that IT is here to help.

“If the CIO and team are not talking and acting about making IT one with the business, they will fail,” he says.

Don’t push change for change sake. Understanding the audience’s propensity for change is crucial, according to David Reis, PhD, chief information and digital officer (CIDO) at the University of Miami Health System and the Miller School of Medicine. Earlier in his career, Reis spearheaded a project to automate the approval process for loan officers at a retail banking institution. Yet after months of listening and information gathering, the team determined the stakeholders weren’t ready for full-scale automation, thus they introduced a scaled-down version of the solution, created awareness and traction, then added more functionality as support for the tool grew.

University of Miami Health System and Miller School of Medicine

In contrast, Reis says his current IT organization is running at full speed to keep up with demand for automation and business process change. “You have to bring everyone along on the ‘journey to yes,’ so you have to make sure the success criteria is understood across all stakeholders,” he explains.

Change is not a solo endeavor. While CIOs are now driving organizational change, they must do so as a partnership with the business. CIOs don’t have the authority to make critical personnel or organizational structure decisions — that’s up to business leaders to get their teams trained and ready to embrace change, says Red Bridge Consulting’s Duffy. By working with their business counterparts to set clear responsibilities and goals, CIOs can facilitate change management work, fend off rivalries, and establish trust.

“Sometimes technology people want to take responsibility for the full implementation from start to finish, but CIOs and business leaders need to be very clear about who’s responsible for what so there is not a battle for ownership,” Duffy says. “You have to reach across the table because you can’t be a change agent on your own.”