The ‘IT Business Office’: Doing IT’s admin work right

Coordinating new-employee onboarding: Business-wide, new-employee onboarding should be coordinated by HR, but more often each piece of the onboarding puzzle is left to the department responsible for that piece.

An IT Business Office can’t and shouldn’t try to fix this often-broken process throughout the enterprise. But onboarding new IT employees is, if anything, even more complicated than onboarding anyone else’s employees. An IT Business Office can, if nothing else, smooth things out for newly hired IT professionals so they can start to work the day they show up for work.

Coordinating the employee performance review process: Nobody likes the employee performance management (aka “performance review”) process. Not the manager who has to deliver the assessment; not the employees who have to receive them; not HR that has to make the process work enterprise wide.

And every time HR shovels in the coming year’s improvement to this process, everyone hates the result even more.

It’s another broken enterprise process an IT Business Office can’t fix. But it can, at least, establish the schedule, familiarize all IT managers in how it’s supposed to be done, and process-manage it to fruition.

Who should run the show?

To the cynical, establishing an IT Business Office might look like the CIO is dumping every management headache into one sorry spot.

But that is demonstrably untrue, because if that was the case the IT Business Office would be responsible for technical architecture management, too.

Still and all, it sure does look like Excedrin Central.

But it doesn’t have to be, because there are some managers who thrive on a diet of organizing this sort of chaos and keeping it organized.

As CIO, your job is to find that sort of manager, and to give them enough teeth to make sure everyone else can’t procrastinate their contributions to death.