Observing Communications
I attended a dinner this week which had an interesting presentation. It was the monthly dinner meeting of the Society for Information Management here in Houston. The presentation revolved around the usefulness of IT leadership surveying their customers and doing some amount of statistical analysis on the results to understand customer satisfaction levels. I agree with the speaker that this is very useful and can provide IT leadership with insight on the perceptions of their customers.
The idea of IT leadership maintaining a clear understanding of their customer base is a big deal to me. However, statistics can’t do it all. During my tour of duty in IT leadership, I spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to understand how our customers saw us and our value to them. In my case, I spent more time talking with them directly than doing surveys (a luxury of a mid-size manufacturing company). What I concluded is that many problems are just communications and perception problems. I’m sure you’ve heard that before but it’s really true. In the world of IT operations it really boils down to vocabularies. In many cases, the business customer doesn’t have the IT vocabulary to articulate their problems to the IT support staff trying to help them. Conversely, the IT support staff often doesn’t have the business vocabulary to articulate their thoughts to the business customer. Communications suffer and customer satisfaction can go in the tank.
The customer shouldn’t be required to have an IT vocabulary (although it sure helps a lot). One solution to this dilemma is that the IT support group either needs each IT support person to have both vocabularies (very rare) or have a few “Translators” on staff to translate business speak to IT speak, as shown in the diagram on the right. The effect is that your IT support staff only needs sufficient business vocabulary to communicate with the Translator and the Translator only needs sufficient IT vocabulary to communicate with your IT staff. I would articulate this with a bridge metaphor, like to one implied by the diagram on the right. The simple idea was that half a bridge doesn’t get the job done.
When I added the staff to actually deliver on this idea, the results were dramatic. In larger IT organizations, such staff additions are becoming the norm but in mid-size companies resources are much leaner. Adding semi-technical staff to those IT organizations is a much bigger deal. I suggest to those of you in such organizations is that it’s worth the effort and will pay huge dividends. The idea of complementary skills is addressed in an earlier post called Alignment to the Core. It highlights that there are different frames of mind or paradigms that need to be bridged. The basic idea is that there is the paradigm where it tools (IT hardware and software) is the primary focus and there is the paradigm where the application of the tools (business uses, workflow, etc.) is the focus. As with the bridge metaphor these overlapping paradigms must communicate with each other as well.
As you can tell, I am a big fan of overlapping, complementary skills inventory in IT organizations. It’s the best way to align the IT function with the business requirements and people. I hope I have increased your interest as well.
Thanks for stopping by. Until next time…
