The Six Best Practices - What Leading CIOs Do

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BEST PRACTICE 6

39 percent of CIOs say: Designate IT staff liaisons to each major business unit

Ambassadors of IT How to best use business liaisons

Many large IT organizations use a federal-and-state type of system with a corporate CIO and several divisional information officers in the business units. Over 50 percent of our "State of the CIO 2004" respondents indicated that that they have IT staff serving as liaisons to the business units to help CIOs identify common needs across the company, investigate user complaints and help users identify functional requirements for new projects.

One best practices CIO said that when he wants to know what's happening in the company trenches, he turns to his application managers. But he has charged these five key staff members to do more than provide technical assistance for the manufacturing, sales and distribution functions. They're also experts on user needs, providing the CIO with early warning of problems and emerging needs.

Last summer, for example, the CIO's company decided to shift some of its manufacturing operations from one country to another. The information technology manager in charge of sales, distribution and manufacturing applications for the division affected - who reports to the CIO - alerted him that some other project should be put on the back burner to accommodate the new work.

At many companies, IT staff serving as liaisons to business units help CIOs identify common needs across the company, investigate user complaints and help users identify functional requirements for new projects. In "The State of the CIO 2004" survey, 39 percent of best practices CIOs rated this method as highly effective. Top CIOs say there are three keys to using liaisons.

Use Business Experts First and foremost, our best practices CIOs said, is that business liaisons should all have work experience in the functional areas they support.

For example, one health-care CIO taps only analysts or IT project managers who are former nurses and lab technicians as his customer relationship managers. The CIO described how a critical care nurse he recruited to be his liaison to the clinic's intensive care unit made a crucial contribution to managing user expectations for a new patient-monitoring system.

Nurses and physicians had asked for a system that recorded patients' vital signs every second - a requirement that would have generated massive amounts of data and slowed its delivery. The former nurse knew no one would ever be able to use that much information. "She had the ability to say: 'If I was here on my own, I wouldn't be here handwriting measurements every second'," the CIO said. Users wanted more frequent monitoring than they could accomplish manually, but recording data once a minute - or every five minutes - could satisfy that requirement in a way that made more sense technically.

And to ensure these business liaisons keep up with what's happening in the field, one CIO said suggested having them spend one week of the year on the front lines, working in the factories or offices where their systems are being used.

Provide a Single Point of Contact If there are business units or agencies whose budgets have some autonomy when it comes to IT spending, it's a good idea to appoint a contact person from your department to maintain a dialogue with the IT staff and business managers," said a best practices CIO who's in that situation.

Another CIO created the customer relationship manager position as a single point of contact between his shop and his organization's departments. Prior to this arrangement, many IT staffers interacted with users, but no single person was responsible for collating all the concerns from a department and coordinating a response. Now, with one point person for each department, the CIO is seeing service levels improve. In addition, the customer relationship managers holds regular meetings with senior IT staff to share information. These exchanges help IT staff identify projects that can serve more than one department and helps the CIO with planning.

Anticipate Issues One of our best practices CIOs decided to designate liaisons from his staff to the company's business units after an executive complained during an IT steering committee meeting about a problem with the company's home-grown order management and configuration system. "Our impression was that it worked fine," the CIO said, so he sent some staff to investigate the complaint. "My impression was that there were one or two people who had a misperception about what the application did, and that turned into a sense that the system didn't work," he said.

Our top CIOs agreed that you can stave off trouble, if you learn about any potential problems that might be brewing before your executive colleagues get wind of them. Charge your business liaisons to sniff out trouble, they said.

And even if you have regularly scheduled meetings with business unit liaisons to discuss projects, keep in touch between meetings. One of our best practices CIOs has his IT liaisons meet with their business constituents every week or two, and to gather information from department heads and lower-level managers alike. He pulls the liaisons together quarterly to translate their feedback into deliverables for the next quarter. Then he takes this agenda to the IT steering committee for approval. The dual-direction communication - top to bottom and across functions - is helping him overcome one of his biggest hurdles: Dispelling a common perception that IT is made of techies with no business savvy.

That battle, like the some of the other hurdles CIOs face such as alignment issues: disconnects with executive peers and difficulty proving the value of IT, which are detailed in this Special Report, may sound all too familiar to many CIOs. But CIOs who follow the six best practices described in "The State of the CIO 2004" survey will find those challenges surmountable.