Building a Better Business Sensibility
- 28 November, 2007 10:11
A business sensibility is not just what your IT staff learns in an introductory MBA course. It's not about how to read a spreadsheet or build a budget. What it's really about is thinking and acting like a businessperson.
For years, members of the CIO Executive Council have been concerned that their staffs lack real business understanding in such areas as their company's market, its external customers and other business drivers. In response, Council members have created a formal learning community -- Leadership Advancement Pathways -- for their direct reports. Veteran CIOs act as faculty for the yearlong curriculum. Pathways and other formal programs are one tool in the business education portfolio (see "All About Training"). But staff must also cultivate an on-the-job business sensibility. To that end, Council members are immersing staff in the business environment.
You Have Been Invited to a meeting. . .
It's one thing for IT staff to meet with users and business peers for a project review. It's quite another to have staff interact with senior business executives on a regular basis. Cathie Kozik, corporate vice president of supply chain IT at Motorola, invites her information visibility analyst to participate in senior business leadership's quarter-close meetings so he can see firsthand how the operational performance data points he produces are used to make decisions. "It's a real aha! moment," says Kozik. The analyst takes what's he's learned back to his desk to brainstorm new ways to slice the data and contribute new types of information that will have business value. Kozik's team also regularly sits down with members of the business to do a "look back" and "look ahead" on how information is being used and how it could be used, says Kozik.
Stewart Gibson, senior vice president and CIO at USI Holdings, asks his senior staff not just to participate in IT steering-committee meetings with senior business leaders, but to actually run them. To be effective, leaders really have to know the business and speak the language, says Gibson.
IT-business executive interaction works well even on the small scale. Brian Tennant, CIO at Bethesda Lutheran Homes and Services, has eight individuals on his IT team. "Our department is too small to worry about creating formal opportunities to increase business sensibility," says Tennant. Instead, he routinely asks staff to join him for meetings with members of the Bethesda senior management team. The benefits of these types of meetings are cumulative as Tennant's team gets more exposure to (and new perspectives on) the business's goals. "After participating in meetings with the CFO, my programmer will go back to his desk and rethink the way we deliver financial data. He thinks about what the CFO is trying to accomplish and the intended audience," says Tennant.
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Business 101 Tour Now Departing
At AIMCO, CIO Scott Wesson always tells his new hires, "You can never forget what the A in AIMCO stands for." It stands for "apartments"; that's what the $1.5 billion real estate management company is all about. Wesson routinely takes new hires out to a Denver-area apartment building to get a sense of the business. He used to take staff on a tour of the facility and call it a day; now he takes the field trip a step further. He invites a business leader to run the tour and talk about what success looks like from his or her perspective. "It's become more of a dialog around business challenges, which gets the IT staff focused immediately on business and customer needs," says Wesson.
Besides learning what the business is about, CIOs want their staff to understand the impact of system success and failure. "I want IT to feel like they are there to serve a greater [business] purpose and not just to connect network cords to specific jacks," says Tennant. "If they can take a problem and think in business terms, then that's a very different thought pattern." For example, instead of seeing a "system going down," they should see its impact on our ability to get people their medication, says Tennant. After such service disruptions, Tennant's team visits with the business function most affected by the outage for a formal debriefing. The discussion focuses on the business impact of the disruption rather than the technical problems. "Next, my staff participates in a brainstorming session with the business about different ways we can mitigate risk -- whether it's having hard copies of medication forms or communicating with our third-party provider to provide medication information," says Tennant.
Gibson sees the change in mind-set in his everyday conversations with his staff and on paper in annual self-appraisals and project retrospectives. "My team is now assessing their activities and success and framing it in business terms, not in technical terms," says Gibson. When I see this shift in communication, I know that everything we're doing to foster business sensibility is working."
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SIDEBAR: A Structure That Means Business
Motorola's new organizational structure for IT staff divides them into three specific teams: "Plan," composed of business analysts who interface with the rest of the business; "Build," the application developers; and "Run," the maintenance staff.Cathie Kozik, corporate vice president of supply chain IT, was one of the first adopters of this model. She made strategic hiring decisions and moved IT staff with advanced business skills onto the right team. She also hired businesspeople directly into IT, specifically onto the Plan team, which helped the rest of the team get up to speed on the business and intricacies of the functional areas. "For the Run team, I have people who sit with the business so that they have the same sense of urgency about serving the customer and getting product out the door as the businesspeople do," says Kozik.
Although the Build team is positioned separately from the rest of the business, the Plan and Run teams are colocated with the business, inspiring a shared vocabulary. "[IT is] thinking every day about volume, conversion costs, conversion cycles and the kinds of things that matter to the business" in the supply chain area, says Kozik.
One unintended consequence of connecting Kozik's staff so tightly to their business partners is that project demand rate has increased significantly. "We now have people directly connected to the business to hear and foster ideas and thoughts. Previously, the business would have lots of ideas but did not have time to bring them to us since it meant arranging special meetings," says Kozik. She tries to keep the number of projects under control by aligning investment planning with Motorola's overall strategy.
SIDEBAR: How to Build a Business Sensibility
CIOs complement on-the-job opportunities with programs from a wide variety of sources.- CIO Bruce Metz at Thomas Jefferson University created a customer service program that teaches how to understand customers and manage customer interactions. "We used a professional trainer to develop content based on direct feedback from the business units," says Metz. The trainer facilitated the two-month series of workshops for all members of the IT department. (Download the curriculum outline.)
- CIO and SVP Stewart Gibson at insurance broker USI Holdings encourages his business analysts to get nontechnical certifications in property and casualty insurance and insurance licenses. He builds funding for both into his annual budget.
- With CIO Scott Wesson's sponsorship, Vice President of IT Strategy Michael Baldwin participates in the CIO Executive Council's Leadership Advancement Pathways program, where he can speak with CIOs and his peers from other industries about advanced business competencies. "Every time I talk to someone outside of AIMCO, I increase my business acumen and am able to pinpoint more variables affecting our business," says Baldwin.