One would expect that
the pervasive connectedness in the business world will make IT departments more
critical than ever. IT Organizations would help deploy collaboration
technologies not only as an equalizer, but also to provide competitive
advantage in the marketplace. The Collaboration technology bringing customers
and partners together would provide the same boost to corporations that
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations did in late 90’s, and Web
did on early years of the century.
For an enterprise,
modern technology tools enable collaboration amongst globally dispersed product
R&D and development teams, discovery of new customers and markets,
personalized engagement with prospects and customers, shortened sales cycle,
faster decision making by quick data processing and getting pulse on product
and services reception and the customer sentiments.
While functional
organizations see technology as a key business enabler, they increasingly
circumvent the corporate IT organization resulting in shadow IT and rogue IT
teams. In addition, emergence of SaaS applications, cloud computing, lower cost
of turnkey offshore development and pay per use model have opened doors to hire
outside vendors for services traditionally provided by IT.
Executives look to the
CIO as the advisor on new and fast evolving technology trends, and their impact
to such areas as compliance, governance, data protection, privacy and security.
Successful CIOs have seized the opportunity and re-defined the charter of IT
organizations. The new organization design forces the technical staff to
redefine their role.
Many of the IT services
are now commoditized, but several new areas have emerged for IT staff to offer
their business users better technology value proposition. IT staff is
outsourcing commoditized areas of IT operation. They are spending more time on
peer networking with their business users and forging strategic business
partnerships with business unit. They are contributing to the business decision
making, and jointly owning the responsibility and the risks. The IT strategy
now include SAS vendors, offshore development teams, decentralized IT model for certain use cases
and new technologies, which results in lower operational cost and higher
shareholder value.
Collaboration
is the new essential IT skill
The latest desired skill
that CIOs want to have on their staff is the ability to build effective
relationships to enhance the value of the company. Today, influence of an IT
leader is enhanced through their ability to accomplish results and create an
environment of innovation and agility. An IT organizations’ success is measured
by their ability to help a company accomplish business goals, such as product
innovation, enhanced revenue, increased customer satisfaction, cost avoidance
and discovering new markets opportunities.
Partnership does
miracles where the traditional model of requirements -> develop->test
-> release hits limitations. The markets are very dynamic, and window of
opportunity is short. Competition is global and fierce. Companies need
flexibility and agility in their execution. IT needs to engage with a sense of
flexibility. Successful software development teams are organizations are
embracing Agile methodologies, where the turnaround time is n weeks, not months
or years. They are also bringing to the BU the best practices where pre-packed
solutions are available in the market.
Recent trends indicate
that business and IT teams are collectively setting the strategic corporate goals
and setting up measurable success criteria upfront. IT teams are adopting a
culture of risk taking, innovation and swiftness to enable success of their partners.
During program execution phase, they are jointly making tradeoff between time-
to-market and perfect solution.
Successful technology
teams operate in a model that goes beyond data driven decision making. They,
collectively as a virtual team, share the risk of making decisions with
imperfect information. Effective teams do not wait until the perfect
information is obtained – they are willing to begin under ambiguity, but
proceed with a learning mind, and optimize the solution as new information is gathered.
This is the true partnership, and is the key to achieving higher order goals.
Foster
a culture of forging partnership
Great partnership with
the business is critical for the success of IT organizations. IT management
team would make concerted effort to enforce the importance of developing
collaborative partnerships with the key members of the functional areas they
support. IT Management would also reward individuals who demonstrate such
characteristics.
So what are the key
qualities needed to create a culture of collaboration and partnership?
First, trust and
transparency are the fundamental building block for the partnership. The IT and
the business teams should be able to communicate honestly and be comfortable
sharing bad news as easily as good news. The teams do not have to agree on
everything, but they should do so for the key important areas and be willing to
“disagree and commit” to others.
Second, shared vision
and alignment of goals are essential. Teams that fail to establish this early
in the process run into conflicts later in the process. A test of alignment
will be that the IT and the business teams will come up with the same answer if
asked to rank a list of business priorities.
Third, IT and business
team should have respect for each other’s insights, ideas and opinions. Every
team member on the team should feel that his contribution is valued and know
that she will be heard. They would know their role in a meeting and expected
outcome.
Fourth, the teams must
have joint ownership. Whole is more than sum of its parts. A team shines due to
collaboration of its individual parts. As much as possible, the end state solution
should be optimized for the company as a whole and not for an individual
department. Management should reward the combined project teams for their
success instead of rewarding only one team. While to the outside world it is
one team, members within the team should set clear roles and responsibilities.
Fifth, team should be
open-minded and flexible to make necessary adjustment as external factors
require change in direction or priorities. True IT leaders would spend more
time with business partner then their internal teams to see the issue from
various perspectives and often provide insights into areas that may have
nothing to do with IT. Effective IT staff is open to and understanding of the
macro level perspective on the business problem at hand. They would not
hesitate to reach out and set up a meeting with a customer even if they do not
enjoy doing it.
Sixth, credibility and
consistency are essential qualities. Success breeds success. No follow up or
reminders would be necessary, and any slippage in the prior commitments will be
communicated as soon as it is known. Instead of shielding behind their roles
and responsibilities, or blaming each other when things go wrong, the teams are
able to craft a combined corrective response. Any gap that resulted in
sub-standard performance would be reviewed by the team jointly,
responsibilities owned up and appropriate course correction initiated to
minimize the impact to the larger enterprise goals.
Conclusion
The next decade will
open tremendous opportunities for IT organizations to enable enterprise
success. In the last two decade, IT impacted the bottom line through cost
savings. For the next decade, IT will be positioned to impact the top line
through their participation in new areas such as customer engagement, sales
enablement, web and social media marketing and collaborative sales. To be well
positioned to ride the success, IT teams will require several new skills -
partnership will be the high up on the top of the list.
