An All Too Common Scapegoat

An article in this morning's press, United Health billing flaws persisted as company grew in Sunday's Star Tribune brings to the forefront a very common problem aggravated by the disconnect between business and information technology. The article points the blame for United Health's bill paying delinquency directly at the rapid growth of the company and information technology's inability to keep pace. Ouch!

Rapid growth and IT's lagging responsiveness is a convenient scape goat. Athough (with credit to the article's author) these problems at United have been reported since 2004, IT is perceived as one of the villains. What is an IT leader to do? Take these press clippings with a grain of salt. As any process improvement practitioner will tell you, the reason for faults and service inadequacy lie among a number of contributing causes. One contributing cause will usually percolate to the surface as the primary underlying cause. That said, however, IT needs to leverage these negative stories and vigorously work to mitigate such failures by:

• Identifying the variables that impact service provisioning;
• Constantly and relentlessly drive improvement by eliminating or controlling these variables;
  
• Talking to the customers of IT and capturing their needs in formal agreements;
  
• Continuously lobbying to positioning IT as a partner in strategic decision making.

Let's remove the all too common tendency of management to identify IT as an easy scapegoat.