Emcor CIO Upends 'Traditional IT' Goals - ' Selling the Strategic Importance ' (
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Citing the Lotus Notes rollout, the cell phone consolidation and the backup outsourcing as examples, Puglisi argued that IT executives must take the lead in getting business and technology people to work together.
That means that technology leaders must start pushing the financial and other business advantages and not wait for their business counterparts to start appreciating technology.
"We don't really connect with management. On both sides, we don't speak the same language," Puglisi said.
"We want to bridge that gap. We want to change, which means we have to crystallize our own thinking about what we have to offer."
That's what prompted him to push for changes on cell phones, he said, which were outside of his jurisdiction. It was a dramatic way to show that IT cared about improving profits and was not solely focused on bits and bytes.
"If the value of what we do isn't embraced" by line-of-business managers, he asked, what's the point? "'Why are we giving you this database?' Are we pushing technology on people who aren't ready for it and maybe it isn't appropriate?"
The perception to be overcome is that an IT department is just a functional support unit, he said.
"Yes, we make sure that the computers run and the latest patches are applied to the applications, and we might even facilitate training, but no one expects us to do debits and credits," Puglisi said.
"IT is sort of becoming like the furniture. You kind of expect there to be tables and chairs and lighting systems and staplers. We don't want to be considered a dial tone. There are certainly ways investing in IT can get us closer to the customer."
The way to get around this perception, Puglisi said, is to prove that IT is there to boost everyone else's profits, rather than simply making changes for reasons such as, "'We're upgrading because the vendor has upgraded.'"
"This is a whole different perspective. We're not going to try pushing it out," he said. "I don't accept that we have to move because Lotus is killing support for an existing version."
Puglisi also has his team write application user manuals before writing any application code, so that user needs will be better thought out before coding starts.
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Puglisi said he hopes for coordination between operations and the IT department.
"Changing the business process and embodying this change in various ways fixes the problem. The process is what needs to be improved. We won't say, 'We track our customers so we need a CRM.' That's a recipe for disaster."
Puglisi said he wouldn't propose a CRM package unless marketing and sales said they wanted it. However, explaining the benefits of a package to sales and marketing is allowed, and "You may need to create some incentives" for them to use it to deliver the benefits, he said.
The problem, Puglisi said, is typically not technological nearly as much as it is a question of mindset and resistance to change. "Reorganizing is a walk in the park compared with trying to make management understand" that IT employees are not just technology-loving programmers, he said.
"You have to talk a whole different language. You have to be a politician. My job's about 95 percent politics and 5 percent technology," Puglisi said.
"You can't mandate that people are going to think smart to leverage a hardware or software investment," he said. "You have to make people understand that something is good for them and why it's good for them. This is an issue on both sides of the table. What's fatal, and what's typical, is you go in with the solution and then you try and figure out the problem. We have to listen more."
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By expanding the definition of a traditional IT project and by focusing on ways the company can use technology to save money and improve services, Puglisi said, he is trying to make his department a profit center instead of a cost.
"We do represent a national service organization. If there's a problem with a building, you can go to the Web site to report the problem and, through technology, we find the intersection of [that customer and vendor] and the vendor is alerted through phone, E-mail and fax, all at the push of a button," he said.
Building technicians are now equipped with PDAs that allow for real-time wireless communication. New energy audits and improved energy efficiency systems can generate both cost savings and potentially huge revenues, if they can be made to work well and interact with other systems.
"This all has the potential for being very strategic," Puglisi said.
Ziff Davis Internet's Evan Schuman can be reached at Evan_Schuman@ziffdavis.com.
