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Building the Customer-Driven IS Department: A Practical Guide to Managing the Whole Business/IS Relationship
Keisley Harris, Pages: 148
A guide for information systems managers to help them manage relationships with the business
'Many IS departments want to make a business contribution but find it difficult to gain the business's permission to do so. They therefore have to fall back on making a technical contribution only, but they are frustrated because they feel this does not allow them to maximise the value they can add to their organisation.'
The above quote from the guide illustrates the difficulty faced by IS departments in managing their business relationships effectively. The guide has been written to help. It adopts a simple but original approach to managing the business/IS relationship. Its premise is that the practices of successful market oriented businesses can be adapted to the needs of an IS department and can achieve for IS the same end result: successful customer relationships.
Some businesses are customer driven; some are not. We know which ones we prefer dealing with, and there is no argument about which ones achieve greater long-term success.
Some IS departments are customer driven; many are not. The internal customers of IS departments know which type they would prefer to be served by. Which type achieves greater long-term success?
The great majority of IS departments are there to serve the business. For these, the case for being customer-driven is the same as it is for a regular business: it produces greater customer satisfaction, which is the dominant determinant of success for a service provider. So why do so many IS departments lose sight of this fundamental? Perhaps it is because they do not have the same clarity of purpose as a regular business.
Businesses see clearly that their objective is profit, and most see, in turn, that customer satisfaction is the way to achieve this objective. IS departments, on the other hand, suffer from a fuzziness of purpose. True, most will recognise that they're there to serve the business and so customer satisfaction is important.
But the customers often seem to be captive or semi captive, so perhaps customer satisfaction is not quite so important an issue? And doesn't the IS department also have the responsibility to act as corporate steward: to make sure that a safe technological course is steered – and doesn't this mean that it has to tell the business what is good for it? And, of course, if IS believes its job is to know what's best for its customers, then it is not going to be so good at listening to them, which is the foundation of customer satisfaction.
This apparent conflict, or at least subtlety, in the role clouds the clarity of customer focus. The result so often is that some effort is applied to being customer driven, but there is not the dedication, even obsession, that is needed to achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction – the levels reached by those businesses that lead in their markets.
This guide is for those IS departments who want to match those highest standards. It takes the basic principles associated with being market led in any business and applies them specifically to the situation of the IS department. The concepts and principles are not complex. Any IS department can apply them successfully, provided it is dedicated to doing so. And if it is so dedicated, it can transform the quality of its relationships with the business.
The topics discussed in this report include:
Marketing principles: an outline of general marketing principles and a way of applying these that is tightly geared to the specific needs of IS
Positioning: how to draw out customer views of the way IS is positioned now and of the way they would prefer IS to be positioned; using this to define a target positioning for IS; how to actually bring about the target positioning
Contact management: ways of getting customer feedback, acting on it, and communicating to customers the value of your actions; formal methods and informal methods
Relationship planning: step-by-step guidance on producing a relationship plan and on ensuring it is implemented
Organisation: organisation structures can have a considerable effect on an IS department's customer orientation; different organisational options and their pros and cons
Product: how to manage your portfolio of service offerings in a way that is sensitive to customer needs and views, and that measures the improvements you introduce
Promotion: strategic promotion (ie in support of your positioning) and less formal promotion; a structured approach to all promotional activity; principles of internal promotion
Price: is charging right for you and, if so, how do you do it in a way that assists rather than hinders customer relationships?
This report will benefit:
IS directors and other managers responsible for the business/IS relationship to:
- Really understand what the business wants from its IS department
- Act on what you learn in a way that will bring you closer to the business
- Convince the business that IS is a responsive and constructive partner
- Convert all this into a coherent approach to managing the whole business/IS relationship, based on a simple, but original, model
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