5. Foster Good Communication from the Top Down
If the CIOs in the partnership have a good relationship, their goodwill will trickle down to their teams. "We had mutual respect for each other, and I think that transferred quickly," says Bowdoin's Davis.
Gaer and CME's Krause are friends ("It's a small industry," Gaer notes). And they had worked together in the past. "That really helped — having the familiarity with each other from a cultural as well as a technology level," Gaer adds. Eventually, as their IT teams got to know each other over weeks of conference calls, they also developed close relationships.
Griffin and Davis helped transfer their energy to their teams by bringing their managers to the birthplace of the project at Snowmass. "We did some bonding over Frisbee, golf, rafting and hiking," says Griffin. "As much as electronic collaboration is great, sometimes it helps to meet people face-to-face and get a sense of what kind of sushi they eat, or if they prefer Fenway Park or Dodger stadium."
Griffin says that because collaboration with a peer organization is still a new concept, IT staffs are bound to view it cautiously. It takes enthusiastic leadership from the CIO — and a few gung-ho staff members — to get things moving. "There was some trepidation at first," Griffin says. "But I have a couple of people who saw this as exciting. Sometimes it takes a few people who look at the world differently to make a collaboration effort like this contagious."
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