“The usual approach to problem-solving is to identify and remove the cause of the problem. Sometimes this is not possible because the cause cannot be found; because there are too many causes; or because the cause is human nature and cannot be removed. In such cases we are usually paralysed.”

Edward De Bono

Is your IT shop contributing, however unintentionally, to organizational “analysis paralysis”?

If leadership is the ability to get the right things done at the right time, analysis paralysis is the leadership assassin. It’s the condition that occurs whenever the sheer quantity of data a leader must analyze overwhelms the decision-making process, making any decision difficult or impossible to take.

Executives plagued by analysis paralysis are incapable of progressing because they are bogged down by the sheer weight of detail, research and brainstorming assaulting them on a daily basis.

And a new report from Forrester Research suggests many CIOs are unintentionally contributing to the condition by flooding their chief executives and boards with IT metrics that are not only irrelevant to the business but are poorly linked to business outcomes.

In fact, it goes so far as to assert that most IT metrics efforts still tend to be IT-centric and operationally focused on the underlying technologies, such as WAN availability or server downtime.

Not only is it extremely hard for the business to figure out how these measures relate to its objectives, they would offer little insight into the value that IT delivers even if they could.

Part of the problem, the report suggests, lies in the fact that IT and the business speak different languages. CIOs who routinely insist they want to be major players in the business and to play a strategic role in the organization still, it seems, have yet to figure out how to talk to the business in its own terms.