Who is in the driver's seat? Is it the business... or your IT Service Department?

How much money are you leaving on the table because your ROI plans are not shared?

These articles outline the six steps that are the components pivoting you towards being able to achieve ultimate success for content or commerce driven businesses:

Executive engagement

Needs Assessment/Analytics and the Science of ROI

IT:  Collaboration and Balance

• Marketing
• Operational Execution/Employee Engagement 
• Customer Care and Centricity 

In the previous articles, Executive Engagement and Needs Assessment/Analytics were focused upon as the first two crucial steps on the path to ultimate success of a value driven and robust customer experience and solution across channels.  In this section, we will be discussing the importance of IT Department collaboration and balance in maintaining focus, prioritization and fixing and enhancing functionality, leading towards successful deployments of YOUR selected roadmap components.

The IT (technology) Team is the support of the business team, and provides the business, as a service, the ability to make enhancements in functionality (existing or new), changes in content that are hard coded and the ability to evolve your channels of sales or content by providing backend technological development.  Very often, the IT department is a shared resource, supporting enterprise or company initiatives as well as cross channel evolution. In rare instances, there are assigned and dedicated resources from IT for your other channels, but this is not common. Consequently, it makes it difficult to ensure alignment and focus on other channels besides the brick and mortar. Non -contingent upon this, however, the driver of the online business as well as other channels needs to be the business, with the IT team supporting the decisions and assisting. This is not usually the case for many reasons. Sometimes, this has to do with the capital expenditures that are required because they are in the IT budget, not the business budget.  Often it is because there is no real governance over the interdepartmental processes and procedures that need to be adhered to in order to embrace a holistic approach which incorporates  IT work efforts as part of the enterprise that has stakeholders involved, particularly at the beginning of the prioritization process for the greater enterprise.

IT appears to be driving the business in many companies, writing business cases as well as deciding on components of releases. And even when the business is prioritizing the enhancements of bug fixes or changes, the final say as to what goes into a release is often IT determined, and determined for reasons that were not about the end user, the customer. Time factors, work efforts and feasibility studies can change the business plan to a watered town version of the original, sometimes with major positioning pieces left out or moved to later in the calendar year.  Determining what will be deployed based upon man hours available or complexity of functionality or even difficulty, is a huge mistake. Resource limitations and difficulty of work can result in important customer facing changes being put off for an extended period of time. Basing your business decisions on how many staff or resources you have, is not going to align you properly with your desired end results.  Your business plan comes first and then you figure out how to implement it. Start with the customer and move backwards from there. The customer doesn't care how many man hours it takes for you to provide them the value. They just care about the value. The question then becomes, "how do we do this?"  Not, "we can't do this." The first step in balancing out the relationship with IT and cross channel venues is some sort of IT engagement model.

 Today, IT groups are charged with a huge amount of goals. These goals are sometimes company wide, often enterprise wide and very often amidst conflicting single or multiple project goals for other corporate departments. As we detailed earlier, IT departments rarely have dedicated resources for alternate channels of business. These same resources are also charged with maintaining the current projects (channels). The very best way to ensure that enough attention is given to alternate channels is with some form of IT engagement modeling. MIT CISR research (Center for Information Systems Research, Nils Fonstad and David Robertson) provide an excellent definition complete with key elements of providing an IT engagement model which not only has governance, but can address immediate business needs,  combined with long term enterprise goals and engaging key stakeholders. Some form of engagement model is necessary to bring people and programs together (with sometimes conflicting objectives) and be able to then make decisions that address the challenges holistically.

Without some form of engagement model, the silos we talked about in the prior sections are not only erected, but fortified. Silos in the IT department and the business department lead only to very resource heavy, non- holistic and challenging solutions implementations. We've all been faced with wanting to integrate a solution for a piece of our website and being told that we could not do so because there were other projects that were more important, or because this would involve too much integration, or too many man hours to achieve. We sit in meetings, aggressively touting our solutions for our verticals. Not only do the conversations get heated, but often end up with incorrect decisions being made. Yes, with the science of analytics, this will become easier over time, using ROI proof. We need to share this information with the other stakeholders, including the IT department. We can't run our business around limitations. Rather we need to govern the process and IT engagement so that the decisions that are made are focused on the customer and what we need to do to engage and keep them for ultimate revenue, profit, retention and loyalty.

The next sequel will focus on, "Defining Roles within the IT Department, Transparency, Disclosure and Prioritization and Collaboration."