Tag Collaboration

Entries 2 Total

Inter-Department Liaisons?

Apr 3, ’09 12:32 PM

The quality of partnership between IT and other organization departments can often make the difference between success and failure, both for specific technology implementations as well as the perceived success of the IT department (and CIO) in general. What were once (incorrectly) viewed as secondary connections between certain departments are becoming more critical to the successful operation of the business.

One example is the partnership between IT and Legal departments in companies of any size.  This is especially true with the rise of e-discovery, its increased workload for Legal, and new infrastructure/procedural requirements for IT.

A February 2009 study by Recommind showed that the IT-Legal partnership is a problem for many:

…only 37% of respondents reported that legal and IT are working more closely together than a year before. This issue is compounded by the fact that only 21% of IT respondents felt that eDiscovery was a “very high” priority, in stark contrast with the overwhelming importance attached to eDiscovery by corporate legal departments. Furthermore, there remains a significant disconnect between corporate accountability and project responsibility, with legal “owning” accountability for eDiscovery (73% of respondents), records management (47%) and data retention (50%), in spite of the fact that the IT department actually makes the technology buying decisions for projects supporting these areas 72% of the time.

One potential solution to this problem has been the advent of “IT liaison” roles, not always with that specific title, but with the expectation that a person was needed to shuttle requests (often demands) back and forth between business units in order to improve the situation. My own experience has been that in most cases this poor staffer finds himself in a position akin to a messenger between warring armies.

Continue Reading… Comments (0)

Its Always Easier to Critique

Mar 30, ’09 1:13 PM

As you sit in endless project or status meetings, ask yourself:  How many people around this table are producing content, and how many others are reviewing their work?  Especially in large organizations with matrixed teams, you may find that the ratio is 90% for the review role.

Here are two examples:

  1. Business Requirements are written up by (1) hard-working Business Analyst after consultation with business partners, then reviewed (and pulled apart) by other analysts, architects, UI staff, PMs, systems analysts, development staff and quality assurance.
  2. A proposed Architecture Standard is presented by an excited team member after a month of quality research, then shot to pieces by a dozen other formal (or would-be) architects.

While the peer review role is a critical one, for many organizations the actual content creation process has turned into a thankless job, where it is all too easy for others to show up and pick apart the work.  No preparation is needed for this sport – there is always something to find wrong with another’s work if given a few minutes.

Are you promoting the effort involved in content creation within your organization? How many team members never need to produce content of their own? What is the role of collaboration within your organization for major deliverables – are there incentives in place to gather multiple authors so that many have skin in the game?

Comments (0)