CIO: The Giuliani Approach
The former Mayor of New York was famous for coming down hard on minor misdemeanors. Focus on the small crimes and that in turn takes care of the large crimes. A zero tolerance approach. Why not try that with your IT department? Make best practice your only practice. Come down hard on staff that don't follow the release management procedure, side step testing or are rude to users. All of these undermine the IT function’s credibility.
Some would argue that it wasn’t Giuliani's zero tolerance policy that fixed New York, but the fact that he pushed the gangsters, pimps and drug dealers out to the suburbs. I guess the IT equivalent is outsourcing?
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Its an interesting debate you opened up here. IT outsourcing or strict enforcing, maybe its a combination of both. What are the pros and cons?
Outsourcing has positive impact on your bottom line, but it does take away the ability to enforce, because of lack of direct control and the levels of middle management that you will have to involve. While directly enforcing it in your own IT department, where all tasks are done onshore, could result in better performance and better user satisfaction.
Again, depends a lot on what you are outsourcing. Nowadays companies are so tied up with the concept, partially pushed by companies like Infosys, that almost everything is being outsourced. Surpringly, neither the client nor the company is aware of the capabilities of the people who are doing their work for them now, or are blind to it when CVs are fwd-ed to them. If you look at it from this point of view, it is partially (if not wholly) the fault of the CIO who decides to outsource without due diligence on whom the tasks are being outsourced to.
So if it is to pick on nitty gritty and processes, then the chain of command should flow down to ensure the same is enforced on the organisations to which a task is outsourced as well.
Also the decision of which tasks to enforce might need to be heavily evaluated as this is where the maximum value is created as well as lost.