It's All About Alignment - Again

The initial push to revamp business process at Maritz started with the business side, Phillips says, "but we did it in partnership with sales, operations and IT." (Phillips emphasizes the importance of getting sales to the table from the very beginning. Remember, he says, it's all about the customer.)

But at the start of the BPM effort, Phillips, like so many before him, had to confront the seemingly ubiquitous and frustrating disconnect between the business and IT. "IT wasn't siloed, but it was parallel," he says. "We didn't have a tight coupling between business and IT." It wasn't a simple vocabulary problem: the business just had stopped communicating well with IT.

To begin fixing the disconnect, Phillips "spent a lot of time telling the story of what challenges we faced and, more importantly, what opportunities we had. We really got to where we had shared forums with business leaders, process leaders and IT leaders. Along the way, we learned about the talent of the IT organization that we could capitalize on.

"We established an organization called continuous improvement," Phillips says. "We put one of our best business leaders in charge of that, one I knew had organizational credibility and respect and had demonstrated an ability to collaborate with IT." This group established regular meetings to discuss governance and key projects.

"Having the right person in the right place . . . it's amazing how things can progress from there," he says.

Phillips signed a deal with Lombardi Software, choosing its TeamWorks platform for the BPM revamp. Ninety days later, his team started rolling out process changes.