High synergy needs the right culture too. Armed with all of these skills, you would think an IT organization is well on the way to happily and productively working alongside other disciplines, be they from the business units or corporate functions. But, even with these skills in place this is not the end of the story. You have to create a culture where those skills are put to good use.

Organizational culture embodies the beliefs, values and established rules that are communicated, practised and reinforced by leaders of the organization. Culture creates a common mind-set about what is important, how to work and how to act. Culture is deeply embedded, nebulous and can be difficult to change. A cultural change plan can be designed to enable workforce members to engage in behavioural change that will foster greater synergy in IT organizations.

To create a culture of synergy in the workforce, CIOs need to first put the right IT leadership team in place, one that shares the same vision for the future as they do. To change culture to one with a much higher synergy quotient, the notions of synergy must be integrated much more tightly into IT strategy and plans, and reinforced in every interaction across IT and the rest of the enterprise. The leadership team must also demonstrate synergy by modelling the right behaviours so staff can follow suit and frequently assess progress by gathering feedback.

Once a leadership tier is in place next comes the building of a service mind-set that focuses IT outside itself is the next stage. Shifting to a service mind-set has the additional benefit of measuring IT's success according to its contribution to enterprise growth and market competitiveness, rather than just focusing on technology and day-to-day transactional tasks. This shift can be achieved in part through education, in part through job rotation where certain key individuals from IT are rotated out into the business community, but in the most part by changing the metrics and reward structures for IT people individually so they are incented to behave in a synergistic way.

Workforce planning builds your IT organization's synergy skills. First the good news. Not everyone in the IT organizations needs all the synergy skills. The first step on the road to upping your IT organization's synergy is to quantify the problem. How big a gap between what you have and what you need are you facing?

In an environment where the role of IT is changing and the underlying technology continuing to evolve, forecasting the skills you will need even in the near future, and the quantities in which you need them, is no easy task. Most CIOs resort to some form of workforce planning process is to determine what level of demand really is. In essence, for each role, a determination is made of how demand will shift (up due to expansion of the role, steady since the workload will remain the same, down due to a change in IT's focus or technical platform). Since forecasting the future is hard, techniques such as the Delphi method — a technique that harnesses the opinions of experts (in this case the CIO's direct reports and business peers) — are useful.