Why you need to put a personal face on IT

Relationships are complicated, and the one between business and IT is no exception. As is the case with so many relationships, the place to start is agreement on roles and power. (Not to worry, I’m not about to delve into the subject of marriage and what to do about it.)

As discussed last week, IT’s proper relationship with the rest of the business is peer and collaborator. If you’re tired of hearing about it, I’ll make you a deal. If you drop the whole idea of “internal customers” and everything that goes with that philosophy — that IT should be an internal supplier responsible for “making the business happy” and “satisfying their requirements” — I’ll stop harping on the train wreck that awaits you.

IT’s relationship with the business depends on its interactions with the business. Application development, operations, and whatever other subdepartments you have in your organization interact with the company’s various functional and operational divisions and departments. It plays out between individuals who work in IT and the rest of the business, one interaction at a time.

These interactions are built on the individual roles employees in IT play: The CIO interacts with the company’s other top executives, while the heads of application development, operations, and so on do the same with the company’s middle and frontline managers.

Which brings us to levels — and the importance of personal interaction.

The dynamics of the business/IT relationship Consider this: Help desk analysts interact with employees across your entire org chart. As agile increasingly dominates application development, every developer will also be interacting with employees throughout the business ranks. IT operations is a bit more insulated, but not by much — a lot of operations work calls for direct interaction as well.

Roll this all up, and you can see that the quality of the business/IT relationship as a whole depends on getting these connections right, from the top level on down. But here’s the tricky bit: While the relationship between business and IT builds one interaction at a time, from person to person and team to team, every one of these interactions depends on the interplay of at least three separate dynamics.

The first dynamic relates to the business/IT relationship model employed by your organization, and it requires a shared understanding among participants. If we in IT consider ourselves to be peers and collaborators while our counterparts elsewhere in the business consider themselves to be our customers, the resulting conversation won’t go anywhere, and it won’t go there with a lot of loud noise.

The second dynamic is role to role. From a role perspective, when the CIO interacts with the rest of the company’s executive team, it’s as the company’s technology leader and as an adviser on the subject of IT; the heads of application development and IT operations are in equivalent roles when interacting with their business counterparts. When business analysts stop asking business managers what they want the software to do and start asking how they’d like their part of the company to operate differently and better, that’s a change in role as well.

Role-based interaction has nothing to do with personalities. It’s about what each individual does in the company and what they need to do together to move the company forward. In principle, with sufficiently ingenious programming, robots could have the same interactions, with equivalent results — so long as the robots were programmed to the same set of APIs. Otherwise, they’d all bark out error messages, and work would come to much more of a standstill than happens with human employees, who can talk with each other and figure it all out.

The importance of interpersonal rapport That brings us to the third dynamic: interpersonals. We are, after all, dealing with those pesky human beings (you and I included) with all of their (our) foibles, idiosyncrasies, biases, moods, and unconscious assumptions. The plain fact is that if the interpersonals go wrong, nothing else can go right. The best organizational design in the known universe, the clearest and best-considered integration model, and the beautifully designed governance mechanisms and pitch-perfect position descriptions — none of it will save the day if those pesky human beings can’t figure out how to trust and understand each other.

All three dynamics are going on at the same time with every interaction between each employee in IT and whoever else they happen to be dealing with at that moment. That’s a lot to keep track of. If you ask employees to keep track of it all at the same time, their heads will probably explode — so don’t ask.

Setting the stage for success First: IT’s leadership should build the relationship model into the business culture. It should be like gravity — something everyone understands so well that they don’t even notice it. A kit of stock phrases that reinforce the concept and that everyone has absorbed will help, such as, “My job is to help you succeed,” “We need to figure this out together,” and “We all have the same customer — how can I help you help them?”

This isn’t something IT’s leaders can do on their own, of course. They need to work with their counterparts throughout the business so that collaboration in service of the company’s customers becomes everyone’s unconscious expectation.

It’s easily said, but hard to do — and absolutely essential.

Second: Coach everyone in IT to consciously clarify roles with whomever they’re working with the first time they collaborate: “Here’s my understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish, and here’s my understanding of the part we’re each going to play in accomplishing it. Does that match your understanding?” Take care of this before the time comes for all of the interpersonals, and it won’t get in the way. With these foundational pieces in place, it will be a lot easier for everyone involved to build the trust and rapport they’ll need to collaborate effectively.

It’s easier, but hardly easy, because there are quite a few intrinsic barriers to effective interpersonal interactions between IT staff and their counterparts elsewhere in the business. You’ll face fewer than if the relationship model and roles are poorly done, but fewer doesn’t mean few.

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Credit where it’s due: Last weekend, Paul Glen of “Leading Geeks” fame, his business partner Maria McManus, and I convened a group of 16 people, some from inside technology functions, some from outside, all of whom care about this subject and who collectively brought a great deal of expertise to bear on it. Much of what’s in this article is the result of our conversations.

Thus far we’ve made a dent in it, but there’s a lot more left to do. If you’d like to be part of it moving forward — that is, if you’re interested in being an active participant who shares in the heavy lifting — please contact me at RDLewis@issurvivor.com. In your communication, include something of your background so that we know how you might fit in.

No promises. At this stage we don’t even know what “organized” will look like. We do know that we need more and more diverse ideas than we’ve brought to bear on the subject thus far.

This story, “Why you need to put a personal face on IT,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.