Transforming IT Culture: How to Use Social Intelligence, Human Factors and Collaboration to Create an IT Department That Outperforms

Chapter 14

How to Successfully Transform Your Organization

Putting It All Together

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

—Steve Jobs

I really like this quote. Many people have said the equivalent of love what you do and never work a day in your life. Jobs’s quote is more eloquent, but the sentiment is just so true. For me, information technology (IT) has been fascinating and I have enjoyed my career, and still do. Where else can you get paid to turn concepts into reality; creatively leverage technology to solve business problems; adapt to rapid and constant change; work with so many deeply intelligent, fun, and interesting people; regularly overcome significant challenges; and be given responsibility for a big staff and critically important initiatives?

It has been a great career, and I was fortunate to enter the profession when we relied on a mainframe and punch cards, so I have seen it evolve through many incredible generations of technology, bringing us to a hyperconnected era where IT solutions have become the nervous system and half the brain of almost every company. I ...