Landmine #4 – No one talks to me! Use partnerships and innovation to get your customers working with you, and not against you.

“No man is an island entire of itself…

… any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

John Donne, Meditation XVII

One of the recurring themes of technology is the essential need for partnership. Complex problems cannot usually be solved in isolation. Organizations need to work in a coordinated, orchestrated fashion to improve a process, launch a great product or to solve some chronic customer experience issue.

Imagine a scene a few years ago. New to a company, I travelled to an emergency meeting in Nashville, TN and encountered 30 people neatly divided into an Engineering team on one side of the room, and the IT team on the other. After the initial pleasantries, and as the discussion got more heated, the Engineering VP shouted “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT WE [REDACTED] WANT, BECAUSE YOU DON’T [REDACTED] ASK!” It is difficult to turn around such palpable feelings of frustration, but oftentimes as a technology executive you’ve got to reach to others and turn the situation around. This is core to your job.

Of course, IT and Engineering organizations have historically been difficult partners. That is why Accounting, HR, Marketing, Product Development, Sales and other organizations create “shadow IT” to pursue departmental interest – that is, getting their respective technology needs served avoiding IT or Engineering, even if, on the whole, their uncoordinated spending (or amateurish meddling) cost the corporation more cash and expose it to more residual risk (including brand risk) than would otherwise be necessary.

Given the rise of Cloud computing and the consumerization of IT, the barriers to entry for implementing systems have lowered. At the same time the expectations of technology users, and their experience with consumer use of very robust and useful technologies, have empowered your business partners. Using the Internet and online communities make it easier for non-experts to set up and use systems. All this means that, more than ever, you have to be closer to your partners and enable them to be successful – and you may have to think differently about how you use technology going forward, and think critically about the performance and design of your existing systems.

There are a couple of places to start. The first thing to do is to get your own technology house in order. That is, you must fix any issues associated with the services you provide – specifically, unplanned service outages, antiquated desktops, slow service, and long request and problem ticket backlogs. Doing this provides you with some credibility with your internal customers and is the first step in a series of many confidence building “small steps.”

At the same time, you have to build up a sense of empathy with your business partners and align the motivations of your team to the motivations of your business partners’ teams. For instance, if your technology team is rewarded on the basis of “green flags” to ensure a system’s servers are available 99.999% of the time, this may be at odds with your business partners’ experience when the system performance – as a whole – is slow and otherwise unacceptable. This is despite the fact that all of the NOC monitoring systems say the application is working: there are cultural and perception disconnects to sort out.

Not only must you know exactly why a site went down, why a server crashed, or why a data center went offline, but you must also know how many payments were lost, how many calls came into the call center, and how many orders were delayed. You must understand the fallout associated with service degradation, and how this impacts activations or fulfillment. If you cannot tell what data points you need to collect to get this sense of your performance, you have no empathy – and your customers will seek to avoid or work around you, or worse micro-manage you.

Culturally, you will have to think different and think like your (external) customer and your (internal) business partners. No longer can you just think about  boxes, pipes and databases while the business is thinking customers, business processes, staffing, revenue or product.

You will have to know how business processes map to services, to applications, and to infrastructure. You will have to do this in terms of a services inventory, a managed application portfolio, or have the ability to know what is running, where, and on what. You will have to figure out what the normal hourly transactional volumes are, and peak times.

And if you cannot speak in this new language, your effective partnerships (if they existed at all) will be fleeting.

All of the above amounts to a change of mindset that involves the following steps:

1. Clean up your own house, to get some credibility. Figure out some “small, quick wins” to build further trust.

2. Develop a sense of empathy, fast. Meet with your customers, and live their days. Figure out what motivates them and how they measure their results. Embed some dedicated employees on a semi-permanent basis to foster team relationships and keep lines of communication open. Make their success, your success.

3. Measure application performance from a customer/ business partner perspective. Start rewarding your team by aligning to measurable business success, not just on IT metrics. Use heuristics and read “How to measure anything” by Douglas Hubbard.

4. Create joint business and technology teams to solve specific problems, and reward the team when they reach a common, desirable outcome.

5. Break down cultural barriers. In General Eisenhower’s command there were no “Limeys” (British) and “Yanks” (Americans): there were only team players.

6. Embrace change and new technology. If teams come up with crazy new ideas using Cloud and iPads, then you must be part of the constructive conversation. Their crazy ideas might be EXACTLY what you have to do to reduce cost, improve productivity and improve performance.

7. Have a joint roadmap and strategy with your business partners. Refresh it objectively every once in a while. Keep doing the right thing for the business as a whole, with the cooperation and trust of the joint team you develop. You may have to retire systems with an array of “vested interests” that require reassignment to more modern technologies.

There’s much more to discuss. Join me in the conversation.

Mike Ross <TechOpsExec@gmail.com>.

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