[This is the first in a three-part series designed to provide a high-level understanding of the 12 Principles of War, and how they can be applied to create a set of unifying Principles of IT that can be used as a guide in strategic planning, operational control, and resource management efforts.]
The portion of my career spent in an IT leadership role has been in both the healthcare and defense industries. I am far from alone in this — many of the best healthcare IT leaders I have met are also veterans. A natural and frequent conversation is a comparison of the two industries and the numerous examples of both highly similar and drastically different approaches to shared technology and service delivery problems. I began to think more and more about the philosophies of the IT apparatus within both industries, and my thoughts kept coming back to one stark difference that every industry but defense lacks: a universal set of principles for how to create a unifying vision, deploy resources to solve problems, and achieve the strategic objectives of the organization.
In my experience, no industry has a tool as powerful in that regard as the Principles of War of the Armed Forces of the U.S. My goal here is to take the wisdom, truths, and power of those principles and apply them to IT organizations.
Let’s get into the meat of the Principles of War, with one quick note. I have included the original nine Principles of War contained within US Army Field Manual FM 3-0, as well as the three new “principles of joint operations” added in 2011 after the clarion call in 2007 to update the 50-plus year old doctrine made by then Lieutenant Commander Christopher E. Van Avery. [For a more concise comparison of the Principles of War and the Principles of IT, view this chart.]
Objective
Military definition: Direct every military operation toward a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective.
IT definition: Direct every IT operation toward a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective.
The military purpose of war is the destruction of an enemy’s ability and will to fight. For the Armed Forces of the U.S. and its allies, this means every operation — both in peacetime and war — must contribute to this strategic aim by improving the agility and capability of the warfighter to respond defensively or offensively, at home and abroad. This is a powerful, and unifying, objective for every soldier, sailor, guardian, airman, and marine, to pursue. Setting aside considerations of staggering scope and scale, it still behooves us as IT leaders to define within our industry a comparative purpose.
Through a combination of improved business processes, realized cost efficiencies, or recognized drivers of revenue growth, the fundamental purpose of IT is to assist the organization in creating and maintaining a competitive advantage. While the functions that the IT department performs to meet this goal can vary significantly, the difficulty of selecting objectives in no way reduces the paramount importance of defining suitable objectives. We have never seen more individuals and groups with more information, each capable of influencing the organizational decision-making process, than we see today. Without a core objective of creating a competitive advantage for the organization, we run the risk of diffusing efforts, weakening consensus, or providing a competitor with access to the data and means they need to exploit our vulnerabilities. Senior IT leaders must determine their objectives in direct reference to how they can create a competitive advantage for the organization, and with this ultimate aim in mind, use these objectives to inform planning and operations down through all levels and branches.
Offensive = Initiative
Military definition: Seize, retain, and exploit the initiative.
IT definition: Provide the means with which to seize, retain, and utilize the parameters, tempo, and methods of technology-enabled business environments.
Offensive action is the most effective and decisive means of attaining a clearly defined objective, and is the means by which a military force seizes and retains initiative while maintaining freedom of action and denying it to the enemy. This is a fundamental truth across all levels of war. In the business environment, relative advantage in information acquisition determines who is initially able to seize and retain the initiative. This becomes a crucial capability of an IT department because it is the ability to assess the data of the organization and the market, and translate insight into actionable information, that will determine which party the initiative will ultimately belong to. Whoever can originate action will be successful in setting the parameters and tempo of the market.
This is no less true for IT departments that are in the process of maturing from an insular function into a future-oriented business partner. Anticipating the needs of the organization that arise due to shifts in the market or in advances in technological capabilities is a requisite of being able to provide solutions to problems before the business has to ask. To truly meet the core objective of creating and maintaining a competitive advantage for your organization, first ensure that the IT department has the means to seize initiative internally, and maintain freedom of action in designing and deploying services and solutions.
Mass = Focus
Military definition: Concentrate combat power at the decisive place and time.
IT definition: Concentrate the elements of technology services and solutions at the place and time which best further pursuit of the primary objective.
The concept of Mass from the military perspective is to synchronize all elements of combat power at the place and time where they will have the most decisive effect on an enemy force. This does not mean swarming numerically superior troops upon the enemy’s position. The goal is to coordinate the massing effects of combat power, along with “force multipliers,” to allow even numerically inferior forces to achieve decisive results while limiting exposure to harm from the enemy’s combat powers. What this means for the business and technology world is the need for senior leaders and managers to synchronize actions that may be separated by time, geographic location, and function, to achieve concentrated effects over the broad range of stakeholders involved in the successful completion of organizational objectives.
For the IT professional, the challenge of focusing interdepartmental elements of services and solutions is becoming both easier and more difficult. The continued maturation toward real-time reporting and analytics requires an immediate human interpretation of events regardless of whether a complete understanding of time and place has been attained. Business executives are going to challenge IT leaders to speed up their ability to provide accurate, trustworthy, and objective, information into an environment that is rife with emotion, and actors that will to tailor and spin information to meet their own agenda. The primary determinant of success will always be to bring the conversation back to the objectives of the organization, so that the mission, vision, values, and strategy that informed them, can remain a fixture of the decision-making process even in the most chaotic of times.
Economy of Force = Economy of Effort
Military definition: Allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts.
IT definition: Allocate the minimum essential resources to subordinate priorities.
Economy of Force is the judicious application of forces and combat power: minimum resources are allocated to secondary efforts; no part of the force should ever be left without a purpose; and resources allotted to secondary priorities should still see their tasks such as limited attacks — holding a defensive position, delaying an enemy advance, performing an act of deception, etc., measured against its effect on the ability of the overall force to achieve mass elsewhere at the decisive point and time on the battlefield. In my experience, IT leaders do not struggle with allocating minimum resources to secondary efforts. But there are major deficiencies in making sure that everyone feels a sense of purpose — both shared and individually — and understands how their daily, tactical efforts align and roll up to the overall support of core objectives.
I have seen many examples of toxic IT environments where one area of a department is appropriately given the lion’s share of resources due to a major organizational initiative, while the teams that are doing the basic “blocking and tackling” for them are under-resourced and unappreciated. This can also be destructive within a single team where a star employee earns recognition and privileges while leading the big project of the quarter, and the rest of the team feels disenfranchised while they have had to take on secondary tasks. Even great teams and departments can see the bonds that hold them together disintegrate along with their morale and results. Prioritizing resources is an absolute necessity, but if done in a way that does not give the staff that is supporting subordinate priorities a purpose or a sense of accomplishment in the results, it risks becoming a recipe for workplace disaster.
Part 2 Coming Soon
[This piece was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse by Jonathan Etheridge, Director of IS and CIO at Cullman Regional Medical Center.]
Share Your Thoughts
You must be logged in to post a comment.