A Center for CIO Leadership Summary
To exploit growth opportunities, processes must work cross-functionally and across business units. The IT organization can play a pan-organizational role that increases success rates for cross-cutting change initiatives.
A Framework for Cross-Organizational Process Change
There are three steps in building successful end-to-end process change.
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Identifying Opportunities |
Brokering Consensus
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Managing Change
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IT can help identify and prioritize organization-wide processes to redesign by increasing functional and business unit staffs’ understanding of current processes.
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The CIO and other members of IT staff can help business leaders come to consensus on which processes should be changed or standardized.
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The IT organization can coordinate business process change and support assimilation of the changes. |
Case Studies on Identifying Opportunities and Brokering Consensus
Nova Chemicals’ CIO helps the business identify processes that need to change. By mapping process maturity and value, Nova IT staff helps business unit and functional leaders identify which processes need to:
- Adapt to fit many situations: high-value, mature processes
- Innovate to something not in the company today: high-value, immature processes
- Standardize across the business: low-value, immature processes
- Stay the same: low-value, mature processes
Diageo’s CIO streamlines consensus building on process change initiatives. The CIO and IT organization helps cross-functional groups of executives come to consensus on high-level process decisions, using in-depth interviews and questionnaires. The process helps groups focus on the few key areas where there is little agreement and acknowledge that there is wide consensus on the other areas.
Conclusions and Recommendations
With its unique cross-cutting perspective, the IT organization and the CIO are positioned to help identify, address, and manage process changes that cut across the enterprise. IT staff can help line of business management understand current processes and where cross-cutting processes are broken. The CIO and other senior IT leadership can guide management teams toward consensus on which cross-cutting processes must change. And, once a direction for process change is set, the IT organization must support change efforts to the fullest extent possible. Critically, this should include coordinating and sequencing multiple changes to make best use of the organization’s overall capacity to change.
Related CIO Executive Board Materials
CIO Executive Board members can access related materials at the CIO Executive Board website. This website also provides information to nonmembers who may be interested in joining the CIO Executive Board.
About the CIO Executive Board
The CIO Executive Board is a membership of senior executives with a shared commitment to steward enterprise-wide IT initiatives. The membership offers a set of unique services and practical tools designed to assist IT leaders with their most pressing managerial, communications, and decision-making challenges, and serves more than 1,000 CIOs and Heads of IT worldwide.
