Keith Blizard, Fidelity Investments, Senior VP, Public Cloud Services
- IT leaders must establish a long-term vision to successfully align their teams
with organizational priorities. - IT must practice effective demand management and resource planning to stay on track with its goals.
“People are so reactive that they’re not planning ahead
and focusing on those future tasks.”
In Keith Blizard’s experience, not enough IT leaders create a strategic technology vision that they can then use to align their teams with a common goal. “I’m a firm believer in keeping your technical knowledge up to date and in focusing on the vision for the next 12 to 36 months,” he says. “Your job is then to build that vision, that energy, that excitement, and then put all that into different mechanisms. If I have 10 things that I want the team to accomplish in the next two years, I’m not going to give the team all 10 of those things on day one. I’m going to pick the first two or three,” he says.
Blizard believes that it’s essential to empower IT teams by giving them the guidance they need to make smart decisions and focus on the right work. “Allow the individual teams to drive their operating and tactical approaches to doing the job. Ensure that guidance and accountability exists at the edge so that the people actually doing the work can make decisions for themselves rather than having everything driven from the top down,” he explains.
This is an excerpt from 9 Experts on How to Align IT’s Work to Company Strategy. The eBook was generously sponsored by Workfront.
