I would add an additional consideration when considering the RM role and the individuals for filling the role. Many, if not most, business executives desire to work with individuals in a service provider role who have the intellectual capability to be close to a peer. Engaging in meaningful conversations about the business and its implications for technology requires balance across the executive and the RM.

Purposeful attention to having RM’s with “processing power” comparable to the executive is powerful in addition to the maturity comments offered earlier.

I will say, however, that while Level 3 maturity organizations typically get the most out of a well-designed and staffed RM role, mid-Level 2 organizations can also do well with the role. Much below that, it’s usually a losing proposition (though there are exceptions!)

The risk of RM’s becoming a route to address operational concerns is a big trap – hence the maturity issue – you need sufficiently stable operations and a sufficiently robust help system that makes it easy for the RM to stay out of day-to-day operational issues. If your business partners see you as a “supply manager” (rather than demand focused) you will find it very hard to have credibility and get traction on the demand side.

So, your question to me ends up where all good questions end (or begin?) – “How can I influence to bring the necessary changes?”

That will be a topic of a future post (or series, more likely!) In the meantime, please do get in contact with me and let’s see what we can achieve by phone.

I particularly enjoyed this piece and the responses too. After 18 months of attempting to establish the RM role, we are still having internal wrangles; where should RM’s responsibilities start/end, how to fit other roles such as, Programme Management, Business Analysis and not least other senior managers (Strategic, Technical Architects, Operations) who see RMs somehow occupying a ‘strategic’ position punching its weight above the established hierarchy.

We are now about to embark on (yet another) re-structure (massive cuts in the public sector) , the role of the RM is back in focus. Ours is an organisation with no CIO (not in the manner your readers would recognise) yet somewhere, somehow having RMs in the IT department seems to have been agreed without any clear understanding of the outcomes expected or desired. Now I and my other RM colleagues have to fight internal battles to gain foothold in the IT department and in the meantime, our business customers see us as a route to raise and escalate operational concerns (my Printer, my PC, can you please order this etc. etc.).

This leads me to conclude as you have suggested, a Relationship Manager can only truly demonstrate his capability in a Level -3 Business-IT mature organisation. What should I do? How can I influence to bring the necessary changes?

Your insights are invaluable and prescient.

As you note, this is all tricky to implement successfully. Which is why the research over many years indicates that less than 10% of IT shops in large companies are able to reach and sustain Level 3 – the top level of Business-IT Maturity.

When trying to design a Relationship Management (RM) role, the real key is to spend a lot of time and focus on fully understanding and vetting the actual role and responsibilities for the RM versus other key/related roles – e.g., Program/Project Manager, IT Product/Application Manager, Senior Business Analyst, etc.

The four dimensions presented are all necessary, but most people do not spend the time in truly defining and understanding the impacts on all IT roles, processes, and governance mechanisms (governance is especially important to clarify the decision rights for an RM). This includes an ongoing review of the RM role with feedback on how well it’s working and actions that should be taken to keep it on track.

So as a company attempts to implement the RM role to improve Business/IT alignment, is it willing to spend the time to do it right? If poorly executed, it could only add confusion.

But you’ve nicely highlighted an important 4th dimension – structural alignment. I think this is true for many aspects of IT operating model design, but certainly is critical in the design of the integration points between business and IT.

Thanks for important comment!

Great blog about relationship managers…nicely follows up your earlier blogs on similar topics.

Matching the relationship manager and the business executive’s ‘maturity’ is something many designers seem to miss…until the frustration level is so high that a change his needed. It’s a subtle point, but this blog makes it really clear and explains how important it is.

Seems to be a dimension missing from the 3 you suggest. Maybe it’s part of maturity or maybe part of geography…but there is a dimension for successful alignment that has to do with the structure of the IT organization itself.

IT organizations whose structure mirrors the businesses they support seem to have more success in aligning with their business counterparts than those that don’t. That is to say that aligning the reward/incentive systems, the control systems, the communication/collaboration systems, and maybe even the level of the relationship manager/business unit liaison are design criteria that every CIO has some control over and which must be considered as part of IT-Business alignment. In my experience, competing structural components bring down a relationship manager much faster than domain expertise (which can be learned), geography (which can be changed) or maturity (which takes time to emerge).