Many IT organizations are run through a culture of fear.  The fear is of course costs.   Stalin might as well be running them for how effective they are. 

This article is of course targeted at business leadership.   It's very tempting to appoint Stalin as  your CIO.  Stalin gets things done.  Stalin always says yes, he's the consummate politician.   However, for many businesses, IT is a core part of how customers interact with the business and can even be a differentiator. Do you really want Stalin there?  Do you really want to sic Stalin on your customers?

The analogy is rather far fetched, but the outcome, maybe not so.  Culture is the most important aspect of any IT organization.  Much more important than process.   Much more important than tools.   Once you create a culture of fear, its rather hard to remove it.

As an example.   A company I worked with closely had a cost problem.  Instead of focusing on improving service at the same time as removing waste, the CEO appointed Stalin.  Stalin reduced costs.   Stalin doesn't really care much about the end result.  He cares only for power.   Leaders who had new ideas of how to improve service were marginalized and purged.  The culture change to one of thinking of the customer to one of protecting one's backside.  Senior IT leaders in this company now only cared not to come to Stalin's notice - the customer was spoken of, but at the end of the day paled into insignificance compared to Stalins' wrath, and the irrelevant metrics that Stalin measured his staff by.

In this company, Stalin is now gone.   He's been gone for over year.  But he's still running IT.  How is this possible?  Stalin created culture of fear.   His senior leaders manage through a culture of fear and protecting their own area.   The new leader might as well go home because the culture has become so embedded that without a wholesale staff change of all leadership, the organization will never move from cost focused to service focus, no matter how much lip service they pay it.

The point of this article is to beware of appointing Stalin to run IT.  You may think he can add value, even for a short time.  Stalin is very tempting.  But Stalin never pays off in the long run.  Just look at the Soviet Union.

Culture trumps process and tools every day of the week.  The difference between a rabble and a well run department is often Culture.  Well run organizations understand this and build an appropriate culture over a long period of time.