Changing the IT Provider Relationship

Last time I wrote about four profiles that categorize the relationship between business and IT – called the “IT Provider Relationship” profiles.  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you might want to read the last article and then come back here.

It’s common to see business leaders wanting IT to be a partner or enabler to the business yet treat the IT organization as a commodity or utility.  The tough question when this gap exists is, “How do we fix it?”

I wish there was a magical phrase you could utter or a magic wand you could wave to alter that relationship instantly.  In reality, it takes time, consistent commitment and effort.  However, here are some suggestions that have worked with clients that you might want to consider:

1.  Get the business people to recognize the current and desired IT provider relationship profiles for your organization.  Having a common vocabulary and some semi-scientific data do wonders for facilitating conversation.  It also helps secure the business leadership’s buy-in that this is something important which deserves focus.  Just like in a strained marital relationship, if only one party wants to work on things, progress is usually difficult to achieve.

2.  If you’ve made it to step 2 then you have business buy-in.  Congratulations!  But, act quickly.  Business leaders sometimes have short attention spans.  If you have their attention and awareness that the IT Provider relationship needs work, then do not fritter away the opportunity.

3.  Establish regular communications between business and IT leaders about things that matter to the business and the associated IT implications.  Some of my clients do this twice a year.  Others do it quarterly.  I wouldn’t recommend doing it any more frequently than quarterly because that’s kind of like watching grass grow.  I wouldn’t recommend meeting any less than twice a year because remember step 2…short attention spans. 

As a side comment, it is imperative that this begin with the executive teams.  Leaders need to model the way.  Your staff will see it as “programme du jour” if executives expect their underlings to make all the changes whilst their own behavior remains constant.  Keep in mind that most of the people who keep the IT shop running have probably been around for a lot longer than you and have watched bright-eyed, eager CIOs with “great ideas” come and go.  They know they have outlasted many a CIO.  They often see themselves as having a better understanding of how things really work in the company and many feel they care about the business’ longevity more than the leadership team.  You don’t want your team seeing you and your leadership team as “suits” primarily focused on their own resume enhancement.

4.  Build a practical IT transformation plan that has business buy-in, connection to business objectives, assigned ownership, identified dependencies, realistic schedules, and prioritization based upon the support for business objectives.  Don’t have more work-streams going at once than your organization can handle.

5.  Build an effective business / IT governance model.  Many business leaders think their IT team moves at a sloth-like pace but often that’s because the IT staff keeps being diverted to do firefighting or to handle impromptu, under-developed, executive requests.  Anytime an organization spends more than 20% of their time fighting fires and handling ad hoc requests, they are in desperate need of improved governance.  If they spend more than 5% of their time doing this, they are in need of improved governance…it’s just not at the full-out “desperate” state yet.   

Governance includes the organization’s guiding principles for decision-making and accountability.

• Who has the authority to make what decisions?
• Who will be held accountable for what?
• How are decisions made?
• Who has to be consulted before making a decision?
• Who has to be informed of decisions and when?
• What’s the dispute resolution process?

6. Set IT key performance indicators (KPIs) that are meaningful to the business.  Don’t set targets that are just IT focused or things that IT knows it will achieve.  And if you are gathering statistics, then review them and use them to make fact-based decisions.

7. Focus on delivering solid utility-based IT services.  If you deliver inconsistent or inadequate service quality, you haven’t earned the right to move to a partner relationship.  Service quality improvement needs to occur in concert with business / IT governance because often service quality issues arise from a firefighting / ad hoc culture that impedes IT’s ability to fix broken processes.  Sometimes fixing service quality issues involves organizing IT into dedicated teams focused on building new solutions, implementing those solutions, and maintaining them. 

As a side note, sending your whole staff to ITIL training does not magically fix service quality.  If the executive leadership team is not fulfilling their critical role in organizational and process change, then sending everyone off for ITIL certification is just going to frustrate the staff and reduce their confidence in the leadership team.  Please see the side note for step 3 above.

8. Improve your architecture skills for the full span of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and start to develop a vocabulary and repository for enterprise architecture elements.  You’ve already taken some of the initial steps in establishing EA if you’ve made it this far, but you just haven’t called it that yet…and therefore probably haven't gotten hung-up on an academic approach that would earn you an A+ in an Ivy League business school but be impossible to implement in the real world.

9. Establish a communication process to communicate regularly to key stakeholders.  Communicate successes in business terms.  Hopefully this is easy to do because by now you’re measuring things that are meaningful to the business.  This also gives a regular structure for having other levels of IT leadership communicate regularly with their business counterparts.

10. Establish an “innovation factory” where a few business and IT people look at industry and technology trends and then brainstorm on ways to use technology for business competitive advantage.  Or, get started with a simpler approach of having IT people job-shadow business people to see the impact of their handiwork on the end client.

I’d like to label this list as “10 easy steps to improve the IT / Business relationship.”  However, to accomplish all 10 items takes at least 2 years.  That doesn’t mean that you won’t see business benefits until then.  Most clients start to see benefits within the first quarter or two of committed execution on their transformation plan.  The key is to get started and be practical.  Two years from now you can either have made progress or be the same place you are now…or possibly worse…since doing nothing while others move forward turns into a relative step backwards.