Tag Partnership

Entries 3 Total

What Is Your Department’s Brand?

Jun 3, ’09 3:18 PM

Lets start with the word “brand”, which seems to be in greater use than ever before, with much energy expended around “personal branding”, etc.  A quick search yields radically varied definitions of the term, from a declaration that your brand is simply what you say about yourself on as many social networks as possible, repeatedly, until it somehow “sticks”, to the Wikipedia definition that:

A brand is a collection of experiences and associations connected with a service, a person or any other entity.

…which to my mind is much more substantial, lasting, and very close to “reputation.”

What are the experiences and associations that others have of your IT shop? What are the few choice terms that would be repeated by your customers to describe your department? Following are three examples you might be shooting for:

Precision: If your team is known by its precision, it means that you are data-driven in everything that you do, take getting the numbers right very seriously, and show pride in that behavior. In practice it might mean that when you have low confidence in a number, you state as much, rather than blowing smoke through a presentation, regardless of the pressure to do otherwise. It requires double-checking, on your part and all the way down the line. It requires identifying the individuals on your team who exhibit this trait, and figuring out how they can help you set the bar high for others. It requires getting it right a high percentage of the time, but also coming clean when you discover that a prior representation your team made was incorrect.

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Are You Building IT Partnerships or Vendorships?

Jun 2, ’09 10:17 AM

The words partner and vendor are thrown around a great deal in the IT environment, often with the word “strategic” attached (woe be unto you if you are only considered a “non-strategic vendor”). Its common to hear both words used in a single meeting between parties, or found within documents describing a business relationship on the drawing board. Are these words interchangeable in general use?

I would suggest that they should not be, and offer five traits of real business partnerships, a model that can pay great dividends to an organization.

(1) The Long-Term View – This is perhaps the key trait, and drives all the others. To take a long-term view, you must first have enough confidence in your new business partner that you plan for a multi-year business relationship from the outset. This includes the investment to create a comprehensive agreement that will support you well for several years, align incentives and rewards so that both parties benefit, and likely includes your personal involvement. At the start of the agreement, do you have enough confidence in this new partner that you can imagine working with them for many years, or would you swap them out at the first sign of trouble?

In practice this means that you will also have a longer view of the internal “score sheet” that we all keep for each partner, judging their performance but also the root cause of mistakes made, etc. Just as the stock market goes up and down but over time we (hope to) benefit from long-term appreciation, a partner tries to keep short-term blips in perspective, putting them in the context of the larger goals between the parties and the benefits that have been realized over time.

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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.

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