This Is Not an IT Company!

"In terms of providing soft skills, firstly, I think we've looked at our team leaders who are at supervisor level and, since they've got to set the tone of the group, we spend quite a bit of time training them and sending them off to various courses," says one CIO in the resources industry.

David Issa, who was Insurance Australia Group's CIO until he was appointed CEO of IAG's Personal Insurance group in February, says he has found one way of addressing the need for soft skills is to stress to new hires that they work for an insurance company, not a technology company. "It's very important for people to understand that they are technology professionals but they are working in an insurance company, and they need to understand the insurance business," Issa says. "So we put everybody who works in technology through a basic insurance course so that they understand at least the fundamentals of what the company does."

There is also a compulsory course in customer service in recognition of the fact that the technology group is there to service the business. "Unless we're servicing that business and they see value in what we do then we don't have a job. If they don't want to be in the service industry then they probably should go and work somewhere else."

Through regular surveys, Issa makes sure none of his team lack feedback about their efforts. For instance a random call-back to a subset of the thousand or more people who call the service desks daily provides immediate feedback on how each individual is travelling. Then there is a routine review of customer satisfaction, conducted on every large project and fed back into individual performance appraisals. Such feedback, Issa says, leaves participants in no doubt about the skills they need to improve. "It measures those customer satisfaction levels to see whether they met expectations, and where we haven't, where we fell down, and what we can do to improve it," he says.

Challenger International IT manager Derek Goh also sees the human performance appraisal process as an important vehicle to improved soft skills. Mentoring people to improve their soft skills is fine, he says, but it is just as important to recognize the achievements of those who pick up such skills.

"You've got to have a performance framework to recognize those skills and their contribution," Goh says. "The way I look at it is that by doing the performance review process we are saying to IT staff: 'If you are meeting your job requirements, you are doing things like providing a solution, or you are implementing the solution, you are delivering the solution, and perhaps you support the solution. So if you're doing all that you are basically meeting the job requirement that is expected of you.

"But if you want to exceed expectations, you have to start to influence the outcome, or you have to promote the solution, so that you are actually adding value. If you want to far exceed expectation you have to drive an outcome, you have to innovate.'"

Goh says individual staff members know that they need the soft skills of customer service to exceed expectations, because without them they cannot influence the customer. If you cannot market an idea or get customer or business buy-in, you cannot drive the process. However, customer satisfaction also arises, in part, from well-managed expectations. The more technology-savvy those customers, the higher those expectations are likely to be, Goh says. Unless his team can explain effectively when those expectations are running ahead of the organization's maturity, such customers will not be satisfied.

"First of all we try to let them understand what the technology value is to the organization," Goh says. "So they might be talking about a device that they see as pretty useful, for instance a satellite mobile phone, which might be very useful to some parts of the world, but it might not be so applicable to Australia."

To help address such issues Goh runs an annual IT conference, intended for the entire organization, where the focus is on business conditions, the business objectives and alignment of IT value to those businesses. "The IT conference is a very good way to get our group MD involved about the business strategy and the expectation of business of IT, so even the junior staff can appreciate what those expectations are."

Let's Talk About Relationships

When it comes to pleasing internal customers, St.George Bank took a lesson from vendors like IBM, Cisco, EMC, Computer Associates and Fujitsu, says CIO John Loebenstein. With huge numbers of staff, these organizations rely on relationship managers to deal with customers.

"Those relationship managers have got the stature to be able to come and talk to me or talk way down the line," Loebenstein says. "They represent the vendors into the company and they are also meant to represent St.George Bank into their own organization so that they understand what we need and what we are trying to achieve. They make sure that we are not bothered by a score of useless vendor proposals that have nothing to do with our goals and purpose. At the same time the relationship managers are there to understand when we say: 'Look, this is my project, this is my problem, this is my objective'. They are not expected to know everything but they can actually say: 'I understand', and they will assemble the right experts from the vendor to come along and have a chat with us. That allows us to say: 'Okay, this is how vendor X would solve or contribute to the solution'."