The Internal IT Salesman
One of the hardest things is to tell the world (or at least the internal management) what you have done and what you are doing. Hard in two senses, one in finding time to break away from the 'doing' and secondly putting the story together in 'non IT' or business speak.
We are all doing some good and innovative projects as well as keeping the ‘lights on’ but if nobody knows about them, then it can be in vain. Lack of awareness doesn’t enhance our reputation and there is a danger that we are just seen as a support department rather than a strategic partner.
Of course there is no one solution and it needs many different approaches and constant attention.
One method I am trying is what I call the salesman’s approach (that is pre PowerPoint!)
This is based on an A4 landscape ring binder easel. (This sits on the desk and allows you to flip over A4 sheets.)
Now you need to develop an elevator speech on paper to put into business language what you have done, what you are doing and the road map going forward.
You should be able to talk to this for no more than 15 minutes.
Run it against a friendly non IT manager and if all goes well, set up a series of meetings with senior and middle managers, arrive with your A4 book, flip it open on the desk and go through the pitch.
This should help to ensure people know what is happening and they will all get the same message plus you may get some useful feedback as well.
2 comments:
Peter,
One of the main differences between professions like engineering or architecture and IT is that for many years they have been fully documented.
Like IT, the very complex projects they manage involve many related assets, processes and people. Yet unlike IT, the business and the professionals can easily understand each other and these days disasters are fairly rare.
Why? Because they have simple means of communicating with each other. After all, how could complex things like skyscrapers or bridges be built without blueprints or engineering diagrams?
It is this easy to understand big picture of the business and IT relationship that has been missing until now.
To create this picture, and enable business and IT to speak a common language, understanding dataflows is critical. It is the understanding, documenting, and engineering of them which is key to managing complexity.
If we have a simple picture of how each dataflow moves across and through the assets of the business the responsibilities, roles, risks and costs of every IT resource (or group of IT resources) employed in support of each business activity (and/or set of business activities) can be clearly visualised and, thus, understood.
By attaching value meta data to data flows and cost information to IT assets, we can start to assess the ratio between IT support costs and the value of the contribution of IT to the business.
Which means IT can speak to the board in the language it understands, that of money. It also means that IT will be fully documented, providing a standard for governance and a foundation for professionalism.
If you would like to read more about the above see this Wikipedia page:
My blog post IT exists for one reason explains more about the importance of understanding how data flows through the business.
regards
PJW
Peter you're spot on abut this. IT leaders need to run their departments as businesses nowadays - not just delivering but selling and marketing. I think this is why many CIOs are building teams of BRMs (Business Relationship Managers) to in essence be their salesman.
I've just wrote about this on my own blog - take a look!
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