When Everything Becomes a Service – Does ITIL Help or Hurt?

For many years I’ve had an interest in the disciplines of Product Management and Service Management. These disciplines have been generally lacking in IT shops, though that is changing. Frameworks such as ITIL and standards such as ISO/IEC 20000 are helping sensitize IT professionals to Service Management, and methods such as Agile Development and Scrum are sensitizing IT professionals to the role of Product Owner, if not to the disciplines of Product Management.

However, my interest has been strengthened since reading the remarkable book, The Connected Company by Dave Gray with Thomas Vander Wal. Dave and Thomas have awakened me to a fact that I was subliminally aware of, but have reinforced for me why this is happening now. They have also drawn out for me some implications and subtleties I had not considered when thinking about the Service Revolution.

Everything is Becoming a Service

As the authors suggest:

Services cannot be designed and manufactured in isolation, like products. They are co-created with customers and are interdependent with wider service networks and clusters.”

They point out that most companies today have been finely tuned to “produce high volumes of consistent, standard outputs, with great efficiency and low cost.” Even some so-called ‘services’ are in reality “factory-style processes that treat people as if they were products moving through a production line.”

The Customer’s Experience of a Service is Key!

A product is largely experienced as it was manufactured. We may have subjective reactions to the product, but it does not change, other than through built in features. Services, however, change as they are experienced. This means that services cannot be delivered simply through efficient and operationally excellent processes. Services demand a ‘customer intimate’ delivery model that adapts to the ways the service is co-created by the customer and optimizes the customer experience.

The Strengths and Weaknesses of Standards and Frameworks Such as ITIL

My esteemed colleague at BRM Institute, Dr. Aleksandr Zhuk, just posted a wonderful short post titled “BRM Role and Service: ITIL Dyad Revisited.” As an officially certified ITIL Expert, ‘he knows what of he speaks’, as they say. Please check out his post – and tell us both what you think, and how these observations resonate with your own experiences.

Graphic courtesy of Augustedge

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IT Organization Circa 2017 – 5 Year Countdown (Part 1)

When I launched this blog on September 21, 2007, my opening post declared:

I’ve named this blog “IT Organization Circa 2017″ in an attempt to position the domain of interest – what will the IT Organization inside businesses, governments and other organized entities look like in 10 years (2017) and how did they get there?”

I went on to explain that I’d picked 2017 as it was 10 years from my first post – a time-frame that seemed to allow a high degree of change, but that I would (statistically, and hopefully) be around to see.

So, with 5 years to go, here are some musings on IT Organization Circa 2017, with thanks to my co-founders at Business Relationship Management Institute, Aaron Barnes and Dr. Aleksandr Zhuk with whom I’ve been noodling on the subject.

To set this up, we need to consider the major disruptive forces acting on the IT organization today:

Disappointment with IT organizations
Cloud Computing
Consumerization of IT
Global Sourcing

Let’s take each of these disruptive forces and delve into them.

IT Organizational Disappointment

There’s a general (though not universal) sense of disappointment with IT! We used to hear, “It costs too much and delivers too little value!” Nowadays, we are more likely to hear, “It takes too long!” When the competitive landscape can change almost overnight and when technology creates opportunities to reinvent products, services and business models just as quickly, it usually seems to be the IT organization that’s the bottleneck. Typically,

It takes the IT organization time to examine a need or opportunity.
It often feels to the business executive that the examination of a given need or opportunity is an exercise in bureaucracy – too many hoops and hurdles to go through with few of them, if any, adding value.
If the request does make it through the hurdles before the need has gone away, there’s often a lengthy ‘waiting period’ while resources are freed up – the dreaded so-called ‘backlog’.
Sometimes the original simple request somehow morphs into a major deal, as other business needs are piled on, and legacy issues rear their ugly heads.

To get beyond these clichéd perceptions, some IT organizations are now on their 3rd or 4th ‘transformation’ comprising activities such as retooling, re-skilling, reorganizing, leaning out processes, and adopting standards frameworks such as ITIL and COBIT. While these efforts may well be necessary, many are not cleanly executed, taking 2-3 years to bring benefits, and in the meantime creating more disruption for the business customer.

So, it hurts me to say it, and many of my readers may resent it, but the truth is that more often than not, IT organizations are seen as barriers to business progress with information and IT, rather than the enablers they would like to see.

Cloud Computing

Despite some well-publicized snafus, Cloud Computing is making significant inroads just about everywhere. Sometimes, the shift to the cloud is around very small services – document sharing, or storage of large files such as videos, and so on. Other times, the shift is broad based and significant – moving supply chain or customer relationship management processes to the cloud, for example. Either way, the cloud offers an easy way to try something without a significant capital investment or running through the corporate maze of product and vendor certifications and contracting. And, at least in theory, if not in practice, cloud solutions feel to non-IT people as something they understand and can procure and deploy without IT assistance. In fact, it’s often something they are already using at home with great success. This represents a huge ‘bypass’ to the traditional IT organization.

Many companies today are catching on to “big data” and the power of analytics applied to vast sources of data, such as sentiment analysis of social media or identification of consumer purchasing patterns based upon correlations that had not been previously recognized. Big data often requires massively parallel software running on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers – something that is beyond the limits of most corporate data centers, but achievable through Cloud Computing – creating yet another entry point that can bypass the IT organization.

Add the attractiveness of the Cloud Computing value proposition and perceived ease of doing business to the sense of IT organizational disappointment mentioned about, and you have an interesting recipe for a revolution!

Consumerization of IT

This, with its sister movement towards mobile everything is a powerful disruptive force! People are increasingly able to chose their own devices – smart phones, laptop computers, tablet computers, and so on. These devices come with a vast available library of ‘Apps’ to do just about anything you might need. And if you need something for your business that does not yet exist, there’s a universe of willing, inexpensive developers out there who’d be delighted to develop the App for you and your business!

This trend is not going away – to the contrary is is the beginning of a new sense of empowerment – everyone is their own IT department. It’s probably wrong to call this a “slippery slope” which implies a falling down at some point, but it certainly marks a shift in the relationship between business people and their technology – a shift in which the IT professional may have moved from a faceless body in the corporate IT department to a slick, service-oriented professional in the local phone store. (Reality note here – my daughter’s phone stopped working last week and she revealed to me her loathing of having to visit the phone store! She said, “The phone store has become the modern day equivalent of the automobile dealership!”)

Global Sourcing

While not a panacea, and while many companies experience a painful transition to various flavors of outsourcing, most companies have tried it at some level, and plan to do more of it! For all its challenges, a well-executed global sourcing arrangement (or set of arrangements) can help an IT organization flex with changing business demand – both in terms of capacity (the ability to handle more or fewer projects as demand dictates) and capability – the ability to take on work for which the inhouse resources may not have the necessary skills or experience.

Who Is Engaging these Alternate Sources?

Increasingly, these alternate sources (namely, Cloud Computing, Global Sourcing, Consumer IT, Apps) are being engaged directly by the business with minimal to no reference to the IT organization.

So, What’s Does the IT Organization Look Like Circa 2017

I’ll leave you all to ponder on these disruptive forces for a week or so, and then I’ll provide my take on the future of the IT organization. Meanwhile, comments appreciated and encouraged!

Expanding Our BRM Webinar Series

Since Business Relationship Management Institute membership and webinar enrollment began last week, many of our new Founding Members signed up for our BRM Training Webinar Series of events.

Always eager to learn and improve their Business Relationship Management skills, several BRMI members reached out to us requesting that we expand our once-a-month series of three identical webinars, which was originally designed to provide a periodic introduction to the BRM role, to cover three different topics. We listened. Now, it is BRMI’s pleasure to introduce the updated and expanded BRM Training Webinar Series, which now covers three different topics:

“Introduction to the BRM Role”—April 26, 2013, 12:00PM-1:00PM, EST
“Challenges and Implications of the BRM Role”—May 17, 2013, 12:00PM-1:00PM EST
“The BRM Role and Organizational Clarity”—June 14, 2013, 9:00AM-10:00AM EST

Outlines of these webinars are available on the BRMI Events page.

All BRMI webinars are free for BRMI members or $95 for non-members.

Shortly after each webinar, a recording of the event will be available for download. BRMI members will be able to download the recordings at no charge from Webinar Recordings Archive accessible from their members-only myBRMI page. Non-members will be able to purchase the recording for $65 each. Please feel free to contact BRMI with any questions.

I am looking forward to meeting you at the webinar! Thank you very much for your support!

Business Relationship Managers Now Have a Place to Call Home!

On March 15, we announced the formation of the Business Relationship Management Institute, a not-for-profit association for Business Relationship Management Professionals or Business Analysts who are on a career path to the BRM role. BRMI will be providing professional training and certification and facilitating exchange of knowledge and leading practices.

I’m very pleased to say that as of today our doors are fully open for business! We actually had a ‘soft opening’ earlier in the week and were astounded with the response—people from all over the world began signing up either for memberships or for the first in a series of webinars that we kick-off on April 26.

The BRMI Mission

To define, inspire, value, and promote the key traits of effective Business Relationship Management.”

To fulfill this mission, BRMI will:

Gather and disseminate information on leading BRM practices–the BRM Interactive Body of Knowledge™.
Provide a framework for active and aspiring BRMs to share experiences and exchange ideas.
Establish and facilitate BRM education, professional training and certification programs.
Facilitate networking among BRMs to support their professional growth and enhance their career opportunities.
Provide opportunities for members to participate in the promotion of the BRM profession.

About BRMI Membership

BRMI members participate in the development and promotion of the Business Relationship Management role and profession and have access to a Wiki and collaboration platform featuring the BRM Interactive Body of Knowledge™. Members can volunteer their time and expertise for the good of the BRM professional community while expanding their knowledge and influence among peers. Members are also able to attend all BRMI webinars at no additional cost and receive 10% discount on all training and certification products BRMI offers.

Please review this link for membership benefits and to sign-up.

Additionally, we’ll be hosting a series of monthly 1-hour Webinars about the BRM role and how to be successful in connecting provider organizations with their business partners. For information about the Webinars, or to register, please click here.

A Rapidly Growing Profession

As co-founders of BRMI who had formerly been co-moderators of the Professional Business Relationship Managers group on LinkedIn, we were keenly aware of the rapid emergence of this role and profession and the need for a professional body with a trusted source of information and training. Based upon our first few days of activity, we were correct in recognizing the need!

Let’s Hear Your ‘Voice of the Customer’

We are embarking on a series of interviews with BRMs to hear the “voice of the customer.” If you like to talk to us, please let us know. Or leave a comment below.

Digital Business and the Fate of the IT Organization

InformationWeek just published an excellent article titled “Goodbye IT, Hello Digital Business.” The article presents a compelling case for “Digital Business” as a lens into what the more information and IT-savvy companies are doing. It presents some good case studies from Digital Business leaders in the retail industry. It also presents some interesting statistics on emerging platforms for building customer ties, on the main opportunities for today’s CIOs and how IT teams are interacting directly with customers.

Are IT Organizations Asleep at the Digital Switch?

I found the statistics InformationWeek presented as both believable based on my consulting experience, and disturbing! The numbers reinforce the facts that:

The majority of IT organizational focus and energy continues to be consumed by legacy solutions, keeping the metaphorical “lights on and trains running on time.”
The IT organization typically does not play a major role in business innovation.
The IT organization is slow to enter the world of mobile computing.
Many IT staff don’t have the customer-facing skills and business knowledge to play in the emerging Digital Business space.

The statistics indicate a move in the right direction – no surprise there. But the shift is slow – rewarding the early movers with the advantage of a differentiated experience for their customers and for their employees – especially for those IT staff that are involved in these frontier applications. The early movers, through business experimentation and studying success stories are building their digital capabilities.

Accelerating the Shift

Exploiting Digital Business is not just about innovation, agile channels, mobile computing and social media – it has profound implications for the IT organization and its context – the IT Operating Model. I’ve posted before about how IT Operating Models must change for what I called Enterprise 2.0 – aka, Digital Business. (See here and here.)

Some companies are accelerating the shift through IT Transformation programs – reorganizing, rethinking IT processes and value streams, re-skilling the IT organization and, in some cases, radical outsourcing initiatives. Other are using ‘skunkworks’ approaches to learn and build credibility through early business experiments. Some have the most progressive and promising Digital Business initiatives happening in the shadows – outside the purview of their IT organizations. I find that to be a dreadful indictment of the IT leadership! If that is not a wake-up call for a new CIO, I don’t know what is!

Digital Business is Literally Business-IT Convergence

I’ve posted before on the concept of Business-IT Convergence. In many respects, Digital Business is all about the convergence of IT with the business – business products and services become digital, and IT capabilities – historically located in an IT organization – converge with business capabilities. Some IT professionals and leaders will see this as very threatening. Others will see it as the solution to many perennial problems associated with the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ of the business-IT relationship.

What do you think? How is Digital Business impacting your work life?

Image source courtesy of Devicix

Motivation and Engagement – Why It’s Often Lacking in IT Organizations and How to Increase It!

A couple of years ago, I came across a remarkable presentation by author Daniel Pink, and featured it in my blog post, “So You Think You Understand How To Motivate People!” It’s always been a popular post (and a great example of animation as a way to present ideas.) I recently got around to reading the book that inspired the presentation – Drive, by Daniel H. Pink. I’ve also just read the wonderful, To Sell Is Human by the same author, so I’m clearly “in the pink” as they say, and very appreciative of his research, writing skills, and his ability to constantly challenge the conventional wisdom, with insight and clarity.

Why Are Motivation and Engagement Important to IT Organizations?

Clearly, this is a trick question – motivation and engagement are important to any organization (or endeavor) but I have worked with quite a few consulting clients over the last few years where engagement was low – it both felt low as I worked with various teams and observed behaviors, and it was measured as low in annual engagement surveys, such as those by Gallup and Towers Watson. Often, the IT organization scored lower on engagement than any other part of the business – sorry, readers – please don’t blame the messenger!

Why is IT Organizational Engagement Low?

I’m not certain about the reasons, but I have some hypotheses based on my observations and conversations with many IT staff:

In tough times (yes, like we’ve had the last few years!) IT organizations take it on the chin! They are asked to participate in cost cutting, and they do – often again and again! I often hear comments such as, “I’m doing the work of three people – and I never feel as though I can catch up and do a good job!” These rounds of cost cutting take their toll on morale and negatively impact engagement.
Often the cuts impact things that are important to IT staff – education and training, for example, or office ‘socials’ where people get to network and know each other. Even ‘perks’ that used to be taken for granted, such as free coffee and sodas, or subsidized cafeterias have been eliminated.
I’ve noted before that IT professionals tend to abhor ambiguity – after all, they have to reduce business problems to zeros and ones! And yet, in times of organizational change and transition – which have become the new normal for many IT shops – ambiguity is high, leading to frustration and low engagement.
The nature of IT is that it is noticed most when things go wrong – less so when they go right! I’ve observed before that the half-life of an IT snafu is 12 years, whereas the half-life of an IT success story is 12 minutes! It’s tough to stay motivated when you are constantly defending yourself!
For IT to deliver great results requires that many moving parts and processes across a complex environment work together seamlessly and harmoniously. It’s tough in such an environment to create the kind of motivation-inducing autonomy Dan Pink writes about.
Finally, outsourcing has created both fear of job stability, and, for some IT professionals at least, degraded the job to that of a commodity. I don’t personally think of outsourcing as wrong or misguided, but sometimes it is handled and introduced to the IT organization in a crude and clumsy way – for example, as a threat, “You’d better knuckle down or your job will be outsourced!”

What Does Research Tell Us About Motivating Knowledge Workers?

Knowledge workers are most motivated by intrinsic rather than extrinsic factors. This explains phenomena such as the open source movement, and, as Pink points out, the remarkable and almost unpredictable success of Wikipedia – created by volunteers over Microsoft Encarta – a product of a gigantic company with a large budget and a massive team of experts. Pink goes on to define three elements of what he calls “Type I” motivation – fueled by intrinsic desires:

Autonomy

One of the three basic human needs, what motivation researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan describe this way:

Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice.”

It can include autonomy over task, over time, over team and over technique. I’ve posted before about the concepts of standardizing process, deliverables or skills, and how IT organizations tend to get these confused, or try to standardize everything though processes. Autonomy has been all but stamped out in many IT shops!

Mastery

Which reminds me of Robert Pirsig‘s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I’ve posted at length about as one of the most influential books I’ve ever read. Given sufficient engagement in an activity, rather than being forced into that activity by compliance, individuals will generally seek personal fulfillment by striving to achieve mastery. Even though they may never get there, they find enormous personal satisfaction in the journey towards mastery – spending significant chunks of time in what some call “flow.” My colleague at the new Business Relationship Management Institute, Dr. Aleksandr Zhuk, pointed me to this quote from Matthew E. May‘s The Shibumi Strategy: A Powerful Way to Create Meaningful Change. Shibumi is a Japanese word that better captures the concept of flow:

Moments of utter clarity. We feel wide awake and connected and balanced: everything makes sense, we know exactly who we are, what we want, and why we’re here. In that moment, be it one blink or a thousand, our effectiveness is maximal. And yet our actions seem minimal, effortless even, and the experience is consummately satisfying.”

How many IT jobs are designed to encourage Shibumi? Many of my clients create an environment where constant context shifting takes place, as people are shuffled from design to maintenance to break-fix and so on. Not much Shibumi takes place under such circumstances!

Purpose

Purpose provides the energy for living. Think about the things you do outside work – and why you do them. Coaching kids soccer. Skiing. Learning a musical instrument. Volunteering for a charitable organization. All these things have a purpose – and it’s not wealth creation. Of course, there’s an element of wealth creation in our work, but for most of us, the need to make a living wage was satisfied early in our career. So what is the real purpose in our work? I remember some years back in a coaching session with a group of IT leaders from separate organizations discussing the fundamental mission of our work places. Most of the group members were confounded by the discussion – they did not know what I was trying to uncover. Except for one of them, who watched the others struggle with a slight grin on his face. Eventually, this IT leader from a global pharmaceutical company said, “We save lives by inventing drugs that cure deadly diseases! That’s why we do what we do.”

Why are you and your IT staff coming to work every day? Is the purpose really motivating mastery? And do you have the autonomy to engage in your work? What could you do to improve motivation and engagement? As a starting point, you might read some of Dan Pink’s “Drive.”

Graphic courtesy of Success Blog

Announcing the Business Relationship Management Institute!

I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined forces with a couple of colleagues to begin a new venture – The Business Relationship Management Institute (BRMI). BRMI is a not-for-profit association for Business Relationship Management Professionals, providing professional training and certification, and facilitating exchange of knowledge and leading practices. My role as Principal with The Merlyn Group, my consulting firm and provider of the Symcordia® Knowledge Management and Collaboration platform, and my role as co-founder of Formicio in Europe will continue (yes, I’ve been a busy lad in my semi-retirement!)

Empowering the Emerging Business Relationship Management Role

Regular readers will be aware that Business Relationship Management (BRM) has been a recurring topic in this blog. It’s a topic I’ve been passionate about since the early 1990′s when a 3-year, longitudinal multi-company research study I was leading at Ernst & Young’s Center for Business Innovation surfaced the emerging BRM role as a key business-IT alignment mechanism. Those early beginnings culminate (or, at least kick off a new chapter) in the formation of the BRMI this week. Founded as a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit corporation, this represents an opportunity to connect even more deeply with the BRM community, and, corny as it may sound, ‘give back’ to that community and to the IT profession in the twilight years of my career.

How Did the Business Relationship Management Institute Come About?

It is said that the best stories narrate themselves. Founding Business Relationship Management Institute is just such a story. The three BRMI co-founders embarked on the journey to establish the Institute, years before we met each other.

I have been involved in the BRM profession since 1995, when I collaborated with professors from Oxford and Cranfield Universities in the United Kingdom and Nanyang University in Singapore to develop and teach a BRM program for a global oil company. I’ve continued to develop and lead training and development programs for BRMs and consult extensively on this subject via The Merlyn Group.

In 2010, Aaron Barnes, a senior BRM, who built and was leading a successful team of BRMs at a major big box retailer, felt the need for a forum for professional BRMs to share knowledge and develop their competencies. In January, 2011, Aaron formed the Professional Business Relationship Managers (PBRM) group on LinkedIn thus establishing a foundation for what would eventually evolve into the first official BRMI global community.

In late 2011, just as Aaron invited me to co-moderate the rapidly growing LinkedIn group, Dr. Aleksandr Zhuk, an expert technologist, professor, with years of experience in teaching online, and a fellow member of PBRM LinkedIn group, also saw the desperate need for a widely available BRM training and certification. Connecting the dots, Aleksandr conceived of a global professional organization to provide training, certification and serve all other needs of the rapidly growing BRM community. Business Relationship Management Institute was born.

In January 2013, Aaron invited Aleksandr to join us as co-moderator of PBRM group and all three of us met, for the first time, to exchange ideas on how to best serve the BRM community. As soon as Aleksandr brought up the idea of Business Relationship Management Institute, we recognized that each of us has already been working toward making it real. The time has come to join our forces to realize our shared vision for BRMI—a not-for-profit organization dedicated to serving the needs and protecting the interests of the global BRM community.

BRMI Logo

BRMI tri-petal, is a registered trademark of Business Relationship Management Institute. The tri-petal symbolizes a well-balanced unity among the business relationship manager, the service provider, and the business partner.

Our Position on the BRM Role

In 2011, ITIL® and ISO/IEC 20000 standard for IT Service Management formalized the existence of a dedicated Business Relationship Manager (BRM) role and corresponding process, recognizing the need for BRM as a new best practice and IT Service Management standard requirement. According to ITIL®:

The role of the business relationship manager (BRM) was established to execute certain customer-facing activities in various processes, such as service level management. However, as the role matured it became clear that there was a discernible process to support the role…The purpose of the business relationship management process is two-fold:

Establish and maintain a business relationship between the service provider and the customer based on understanding the customer and their business needs.

Identify customer needs and ensure that the service provider is also able to meet these needs as business needs change over time and between circumstances.

ISO/IEC 20000 standard for IT Service Management adds that:

For each customer, the service provider shall have a designated individual [BRM] who is responsible for managing the customer relationship and customer satisfaction.”² According to ISO/IEC 20000-2:2012, to be effective, “The BRM process should ensure that mechanisms are established to manage the relationship between the service provider and customer(s).”

At BRMI, we fully recognize the importance of structured well-tuned processes and agree with ITIL® definition of the two key functions fulfilled by the BRM. We also believe that ISO/IEC 20000 standard’s requirement for having a dedicated BRM for each business customer provides a solid guideline for establishing a well-balanced effective relationship between a business customer and a service provider with the BRM acting as advocate for the customer.

Yet, many years of our collective experience in the field also suggest that effective business relationship management is as much, if not more, about strategic-level leadership as it is about effective processes. Being a successful BRM means much more than periodically interfacing with business stakeholders and IT process owners by means of a process—regardless of how well-tuned this process might be. An effective business relationship manager is, by definition, a master of building working strategic-level relationships, one who possesses all the interpersonal and business skills this entails. Effective BRMs carry real strategic weight in their organizations. Therefore, the BRMs who deliver maximum business value hold senior management positions placed in well-balanced alignment with senior business and IT executives.

At BRMI, we also believe that, like anything else in the age of turbulent changes, the BRM role is not static—it evolves. Therefore, the BRM role is best approached through a maturity perspective—both the maturity of business demand for IT services and products, with regard to its ability to turn IT investments into realized business value, and the maturity of IT service provider and its ability to fulfill evolving business needs. Maturity of business demand and IT supply affect the BRM role and its ability to deliver results.

We will be exploring these viewpoints, and many other aspects of the BRM role through the BRMI blog. We’ll also develop an evolving “blog roll” of sites we believe should be in every BRMs reading list. We hope you will all join with us on the BRMI site in this global conversation about the emerging and evolving role of the Business Relationship Manager!

Why Business Relationship Manager Success Hangs On So Many Variables! (Part 2 of 2)

This is the 2nd in a 2-part series on the barriers to Business Relationship Manager success. In Part 1, I discussed my theories as to why the Business Relationship Manager Role is Gaining Traction. I also discussed 3 common traps that can derail BRM success:

The Service Management Glitch.
The Solution Delivery Gulch.
The Maintenance and Break-Fix Gotcha!

In this post, I want to cover the more subtle traps BRMs can be prey to.

The Subtler Sources of BRM Failure

Will the real master please stand up! The general rule is that the BRM represents the business to IT and IT to the business. It’s a ‘bridging’ role. Sounds good, makes sense. But, when push comes to shove – which it will sooner or later – where does the BRMs allegiance really stand? Not an insurmountable challenge, but one that will test even the strongest of relationship skills and nerves.
Which Business Unit really rules? Typically, there are several, sometimes dozens and occasionally a hundred or so BRMs each representing some business unit or process or geography – or even a mix of these. So the BRM is not only balancing business and IT issues, they are collectively balancing issues among and across business units, capabilities and processes. In theory, business-IT governance as a tool of a robust enterprise strategy and architecture does the ‘heavy lifting’ in terms of balancing these forces. In practice, however, there is the ever-present company politics and the inevitable forces of self-interest, survival and ‘noisy wheels’. The BRMs ability to surface these disconnects and manage the executive sponsors regarding clarity of enterprise strategy becomes key. This role may best be executed by the CIO, who is, in effect, the “Enterprise BRM.”
So, you want me to get involved in the labor union negotiations? Being a successful BRM tends to bring a healthy (or unhealthy?) dose of “be careful what you wish for!” They are seen as a valued member of the business leadership team (as well as a valued member of the IT leadership team). Sooner or later, they will be expected to get involved in things way outside their scope or domain of expertise. On the one hand, it’s a sign that they’ve arrived. On the other hand, arriving provides many opportunities to set out on plenty of other journeys – and not all of them will make sense. Just saying “no” wears thin quickly – and seats at the strategy table can be lost much more quickly than they can be earned! So picking and choosing opportunities to participate, and having a graceful and constructive way of deflecting those requests that really don’t make sense, becomes a new core competence for the successful BRM to sustain that success.
You’ve ‘gone native!’ At some point the risk surfaces that you are disenfranchising the rest of the IT organization from the business, rendering them “commodities.” This is the corollary to the “BRM as the Single Point of Contact for IT” mantra, which is common but ultimately, inaccurate and dangerous. The BRM can “own” the key business relationships, but that does not require them to be the single point of contact. I’ll expand on this point in a future post.

What have you seen as potential ways BRMs get derailed? What have you been able to do to avoid or recover from these?

Image courtesy of denise o’berry

Why Business Relationship Manager Success Hangs On So Many Variables! (Part 1 of 2)

My regular readers (yes, both of them – my brother and my cat) will have noticed that I’ve been posting more about the Business Relationship Manager role lately. It seems that there’s a surge (resurgence?) of interest in this crucial and challenging role. I’ve been wondering why this is, and thinking about the reasons why the role is so challenging?

Why the Business Relationship Manager Role is Gaining Traction

I have several theories about the increasing interest in the Business Relationship Manager (BRM) role:

BRM as a product of Service Management standards. IT Service Management standards (e.g., ITIL® and ISO/IEC 20000) formalized the dedicated BRM role as a new best practice and IT Service Management standard requirement. As I’ve posted before, this is a mixed blessing – one the one hand it is creating awareness and legitimization for the BRM – that is good. One the other hand, it positions the BRM rather tactically – a champion for IT service management rather than a strategic channel for creating business value from IT. Yes, I acknowledge that IT Service Management is an important enabler of IT business value, but it does not reach the highest points in the value chain. If that’s all the BRM aspires to (or is seen as) then the value of the BRM will be constrained, and sooner or later, they will be seen as ‘overhead.’ The analogy that comes to mind is general education – yes, K through 12 provides a critical and foundational educational experience, but it won’t in of itself ensure a career path beyond minimum wage. For that, you need either higher education in some specialty that is in demand, special talents, or an amazing amount of luck!
BRM as the Silver Bullet! After years of attempts by CIOs to get their business partners to love and value the IT function, the deployment of the BRM role perhaps might be the missing bullet! At the very least, it’s the next intervention to try – what harm can it do?
The Emerging BRM Success. Some BRMs are emerging naturally (even without that formal title or role.) A typical scenario is that the CIO begins to notice that the relationship with supply chain, for example, has improved by leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. Thinking about the reasons behind this, the CIO recognizes that general improvements in IT infrastructure services have helped – but these have also helped the other business functions and processes, so that alone does not explain the new found happy relationship. She also recognizes that the ERP deployment, painful as it was, is now through the worst, and is starting to deliver on its supply chain improvement promises. So this is a factor, but the ERP contributed to other key business processes, and while it has helped lift the relationships with the executives responsible for those processes, they still aren’t showering IT with accolades! Then there’s the frequent positive messages the CIO keeps seeing and hearing about Samantha, the IT executive that led the supply chain ERP implementation, and seems to spend a lot of time with the supply chain business teams. The CIO knows they love Samantha, who’s clearly seen as a champion for them, and as the ‘go to’ person for things related to (and sometimes unrelated) to supply chain IT. The CIO realizes that Samantha is managing the IT-supply chain relationships. “Bingo,” thinks the CIO. “Samantha is a ‘business relationship manager’ and maybe I need to formalize that role and create more of them!”

So, What Can Derail the BRMs Success?

Just about everything! First, it’s important to realize that BRM is often in a role that wields significant influence, but actually has no authority over any of the many individuals and groups necessary for the BRMs efforts to pay off. For example:

The Service Management Glitch. If basic IT services (email, helpdesk, mobile support) are less than excellent, the BRMs business partner is going to complain. And here begins the vicious cycle – the BRM intervenes, uses her relationships and relationship skills to escalate the problem and pulls off a minor miracle. Two bad things follow – first, the problem was solved though heroics – the heroes are celebrated and the idea that heroes keep the lights on and the trains running on time (metaphorically speaking!) gets reinforced. Second, the business partner begins to see the BRM as the go-to person for IT operational problems. When that BRM wonders why she was not invited to the metaphorical ‘strategy table’, the reason is clear – why would anyone invite the janitor to help formulate strategy? (With all due respect to the hard working and effective janitors out there!)
The Solution Delivery Gulch. If solutions delivery does not perform with excellence – somehow meeting never-ending business demand, delivering solutions that work the first time, on time, within budget, preferably in less than a month from initial request – then anything the BRM does to stimulate and surface demand is going to backfire.
The Maintenance and Break-Fix Gotcha! If solutions maintenance is not responsive, proactive and prescient, and business process are interrupted, the BRM is going to get dragged into the fray – and again lose their license to be strategic.

The Subtler Sources of BRM Failure

In many respects the bullet points above are obvious – though that does not make them any less real or easy to deal with. But there are some more subtle unintended consequences the BRM faces, and I’ll cover these in Part 2 in this 2-part series.

Image courtesy of Ruthida Namubiru.com

Technology Gone Nuts – The Insanity of a Hotel Alarm Clock!

I was about to write tomorrow’s blog post but decided to set my hotel alarm clock first. I’d checked in earlier, and needed to be up early for a client workshop tomorrow. The experience led me to a very different post – one written by frustration at the stupidity of certain technologists!

Setting a Hotel Alarm

This should be trivially simple to anyone – especially to an IT consultant, right? For context, I’m staying in a global hotel chain – not a premium brand, but a decent, well-regarded business travel hotel.

Before I tried setting the alarm, I needed to get the time set correctly – it was an hour and fourteen minutes fast! How to do this? There were no buttons to set the time! In fact, screen printed on the front of the alarm/radio was a 6-step process – just to set the alarm! Notably, there was no manufacturer’s name on the device – just a “Made in China” sign embossed on the base. I futzed for about 10 minutes.

Eventually, I called the front desk, who promptly offered to send up a maintenance guy to take care of it. This, of course, was both an insult to my manhood (couldn’t set his alarm!) and an unnecessary intrusion on my privacy. I said, “That’s not necessary, just let me speak to someone who can tell me how to set the time.” I was told they’d call me back in a few minutes. I went back and tried again, and on further investigation discovered that although the clock appeared to be working (time was displayed and seemed to click by as the minutes passed) none of the alarm set or radio play buttons actually worked.

I called back down to the front desk, “You’d better have someone come up and help me with this!” Some minutes later, a rather surly maintenance tech came in and proceeded to dismantle the clock. I watched him (for future reference and idle curiosity) and mentioned that I was surprised they’d design a clock that needs to be dismantled to set the time. He grunted.

The task seemed so complicated, and he was fumbling so badly, I decided my watching him was not helping, so I went back to my desk and my work. Ten minutes later he said in broken English, “Battery dead – I need replace.” The idea that a clock that was plugged into the wall socket should need a battery to run was foreign to me. Yes, battery back-up is good – but to depend on the battery to work? After all, this was not a Boeing Dreamliner!

He left and returned some minutes later. Surprisingly, replacing the battery required a screwdriver – another masterpiece of engineering design! Another 10 minutes of fumbling passed – and I don’t mean this maintenance guy was incompetent – the process was extremely fiddley! With the new batteries and the machine reassembled – no luck! He apologized (sort of) and left for another 10 minutes to come back with a new alarm-radio in a box. Another 10 minutes of fiddling and the thing worked. (I hope, having not yet experienced the morning wake-up signal!)

The Cost of Poor Design

I know something about the hospitality business, having done a lot of consulting in that industry. I was staying at a corporate rate, courtesy of my client, so the margin was pretty thin. The engineer probably spent 30 minutes working on my alarm – a good chunk of the margin eaten up. In my semi-retirement, I don’t let things like this get to me (too badly!) but a younger, angrier soul might have taken it out on the hotel, and never returned. (There are 3 similar chains within walking distance of this property).

Who designed this product? Who sold it to the chain? Who bought it for the chain? Did anyone ask any basic usability questions? Did anyone test the alarm?

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