Unleadership

Session was about IT leadership at Stanford (or lack thereof).
Question was posed "What should lT leadership look like?" at Stanford.
Responses took the direction around not so much what IT Leadership should look like, but what obstacles were in the way to prevent effective leadership.
- Management and leadership are not the same. Leaders are those that create vision, managers are those that implement and bring the vision to fruition.
- Communication between the IT Leader community at Stanford is not effective or in some cases, just not there.
- Stanford is a very political environment and sometimes there is hesitation or reluctance on the part of management to say things or get things done, perception issues. Wants to implement a "suggestion box" where individuals can present anonymous ideas. Liked the "Grievance" tool presented by Clarance that is used at Salesforce.
- Relationships are key to getting things accomplished and to getting to information; however, as relationships move up in the organization, information is not as forthcoming.
- Information/meeting overloads are obstacles. Too much email, too much going on in email. Makes it almost impossible to prioritize, especially because the environment is so dynamic and priorities change so quickly.
- Discussed how "Chatter" was being used at SoM to help alleviate the email/meeting bottleneck.
- "Daily Digest" was proving to be more effective for Hans in SoM with his team to alleviate the email bottleneck.
- Discussed need for a tool that could provide some analytics. General interest in the way that Salesforce included the most influential individuals to be participate as part of their leadership team.
- We need a tool that enables communication analytics.
- Mentioned that workflow and lack of process also served as communication barriers. Often, you need to know someone to get something accomplished. Example of how difficult it was to implement deployment of a server IT Services: need to deal with different teams who use different processes for communication.
- There is no source for best practices at Stanford. Very few policies and Stanford, primarily guidelines.
- General consensus that the IT community would benefit from a common tool set to enhace leadership and communication.
- Agreed there should be further discussion around this topic and there would be benefit to formulating a working group. Sam to follow up.