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Thinking About IT Thinking
Another important result of McDonaldization is that it frees up time. And CIOs at larger enterprises are re-investing their McDonaldization "dividend" by spending more time thinking about IT thinking.
In midsized companies, however, thinking about IT thinking is not the norm; in some cases, it's not even a politically correct practice. As the CIO at a liberal arts college points out, "When I got here, each school, campus and administrative unit had its own IT support group. We centralized. [and] changed and redesigned the decision-making process. Yet I don't recall anyone (including myself) articulating the change of IT decision-making processes."
The CIO at one midsized nonprofit readily admits that "thinking about IT thinking" should consume some portion of his time, but finding that time is still "an unsolved mystery of the universe."
The CIO at the midsized Asian subsidiary of a global insurance company understands the need to improve IT decision making in his organization. "Generally, within the business context, the decision defect rate is 50-50, and the case for the decision is of poor quality," he says. "Coin tossing would be just as good and faster/cheaper."
Within this IT organization, he adds, the technical decisions are high quality and well documented but also costly. There is also a troublesome lack of a "big-picture view of which decisions are really important." This CIO is about to retire, however, so the job of changing the decision-making process will fall to his successor.
The CIO at a media company also has a decision-making environment undergoing improvement: "Some decisions seem to take a long time to reach," he notes. "We operate a shared-services environment, and consensus over a broad group is often needed. But the defect rate on decisions appears low once action is taken. We could do a better job of balancing the cost/value of the decision. In other words, avoid overanalyzing a decision."
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