Transforming IT Culture: How to Use Social Intelligence, Human Factors and Collaboration to Create an IT Department That Outperforms

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

—William James

Dedicated to the Corporate Weaver: To those great and selfless leaders who unfashionably rely on sensitivity and outflowing concern to bond with their people; who peer deeply inside them with perceptive social intelligence (sogence); who understand that the social environment is their loom and their professionals are threads of experience; who weave these threads, one to another, forming a closely connected tapestry of mind and emotion, highly productive and deeply collaborative. Done skillfully, the result is pure harmony—information and productivity flow across the fibers. This is human social fabric, the material of modern productivity—the postindustrial equivalent of an assembly line. In this factory, what matters most are not the cost and quantity of thread but the quality—and whether each thread can be tightly woven into the section of the tapestry where it is needed.

This book uses the information technology (IT) profession as a lens through which we can see the importance of understanding the human factors of productivity and how to use them to unlock IT organizational effectiveness; this is how you make IT failure a rare exception, greatly increasing the success of projects, individuals, and teams; this is how you create an IT department that outperforms and companies that outcompete. Our ...