IT exists to support businesses to achieve competitive advantage. However, many business users often see IT merely as a barrier to their initiatives; a function that over-spends and under-delivers. In order to foster a better relationship with the business, IT must strive to change the corporate mindset and demonstrate that it can be a reliable technology partner for the business.
The IT function exists to support a business. Business and IT leaders recognize this and thus continue to make investments in the IT organization and infrastructure. However, on the field, most business users see IT as a barrier rather than an enabler.
If IT is to have an improved relationship with the business and it has to be perceived as a trusted technology partner to the business. IT leaders must work hard to address these concerns by fostering a consistent and intuitive engagement model between IT and the business with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, clearly agreed strategy and scope, and strict adherence to priorities and timelines. Nilesh Chandra, an experienced technology consultant described the lifecycle to change a mindset toward IT as follow:
Strategy
The high level details of a business strategy are well known in most organizations. However, IT often lacks a detailed understanding and appreciation of the business’ expectation from IT to support the execution of the strategy. This happens because IT is rarely engaged by the business during the development of the strategy. Instead, the business groups develop a strategy and then hands it off to IT for implementation. As IT begins to implement solutions, the rationale behind the strategy is not well understood and thus incorrect assumptions are made. This undermines the very strategy that IT was asked to support.
Design
Most business users assume that design is a technical activity where they only have little contribution. The single biggest cause of failure of any IT initiative is flawed design decisions.
One way to involve the business in design is by removing technical relationship to a specific activity from discussions. Approach by talking about design decisions from the business point of view. Not only does this ensure that business stakeholders can contribute to the discussion, it also helps IT get a better understanding of the business they support.
Getting the IT organization and the business to talk a common language can help bridge the historical divide between business and IT and go a long way in changing the corporate mindset towards IT. Business users often have very clear ideas of the solutions and services they want, but do not appreciate the technical complexity involved or the costs of delivering their requirements.
In both cases, the most common reason is a lack of understanding of the solution’s total cost of ownership (TCO). By closely involving the business in design decisions, IT can help them better understand the complexity of a technology and TCO associated with any solution or service. Implementing a gated approach to projects can help ensure the right information is prepared and reviewed at the right time. This can avoid the common “throw it over the fence” approach whereby the operations team are left picking up the pieces in order to provide a sustainable service.
Transition
During the transition of any solution to live, one of the biggest complaints from the business is that IT makes flawed assumptions. For most end users in the business, the testing part of transition is their first contact with IT for a new implementation, and any problems in transition simply feed a negative impression that stays for a long time afterwards.
IT can address potential issues in transition by engaging in detailed transition planning involving business stakeholders. IT must ensure the plans are realistic and take into account business concerns with the aim of standardizing small modifications to large deployments, to ensure the correct level of due diligence is performed.
Throughout the whole transition period, IT and the business need to work collaboratively by providing initial pilot support through to end user training. A diligent approach to risk management is also very useful in this context.
Operations
Once solutions and services are live, a common problem faced by the business is inconsistent levels of service.
IT can mitigate this by adopting a common engagement model that is based on service level agreements (SLA). IT needs to work closely with business leaders to understand the relative priority of services and define service level agreements to reflect the business priorities.
Once service levels are defined and agreed with the business, closely track adherence to these service levels and develop a highly visible plan to address any short-comings. Maintenance activities are usually undervalued by the business, yet this typically represents a high proportion of the workload for IT operations team. It is important for IT to clearly show the value these activities provide in contributing to sustained service levels.
Governance
Having an effective governance framework that covers decision making at all relevant layers within the organization is absolutely critical to success.
Governance models can become ineffective if either side lets them deteriorate into complications about over budget and resources. In such cases, representatives from the business merely use the IT governance forum to push for more resources and budget to support their priority initiatives and IT loses control of how its scarce resources are allocated.
There may be circumstances where IT has to push out a project and they must be able to use the governance forum to discuss this priority. In order to avoid such a fate, IT must engage the leadership of the organization within a formal governance structure and define clear rules for engagement as well as mechanisms for the prioritization of requests and allocation of budget. This helps to ensure that the business representatives take a holistic view of the business, rather than a parochial view of their own constituency.
IT must also use its knowledge of the business strategy and technological innovations in the market to help define the agenda for technology within the organization.
Conclusion
Changing a corporate mindset towards IT is achievable. It is a two-way effort between the business and IT as they both need to change. By making the changes throughout a service lifecycle from strategy, design, transition, operations, and governance, IT can act as an effective partner to the business and help change the corporate mindset.