A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value Quotes

“Saying that “the business is IT’s customer, and the customer is always right” seems like a good idea when there is deep dissatisfaction with IT that stems from a long history of unreliable service. But over the long term, this value trap sets up the IT unit for failure because customers are often wrong (especially about matters in which they are not experts), and calling colleagues “customers” puts a wedge between IT and the rest of the business.9”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“There is my CIO role in a nutshell: establish the goal, learn from the team, and render their ideas in rules that apply to future teams as a form of institutional memory. There must be a feedback cycle from the teams’ learning to leadership’s context-setting and rule-making.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“It is difficult for IT to gain a seat at the table when IT is always failing, but on the other hand, an IT leader who is reacting to statistical noise—failures that he or she has already chosen to accept—is destroying business value. An IT leader must have the necessary technical skills, make impeccable decisions under uncertainty, and then have the courage to face the consequences.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Remember that these are the same project executors that we chose to execute the project—presumably because we believed we could trust them to make good decisions. They were probably trained, or at least hired, by the enterprise to make sure they had the right skills. So when the project is off schedule, is it natural to first suspect those project executors?”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility