BEST PRACTICE 5

71 percent of our CIOs say: Communicate regularly with users at large

Keep Talking How to keep in contact with everyone

According to "The State of the CIO 2004" survey, CIOs spend 26 percent of their time communicating with users - from business leaders on down. If you add in the time CIOs spend managing staff, interacting with outside partners and dealing with vendors, they spend well over 75 percent of their time communicating in some form. Moreover as noted previously, regular communication with users ranks at the number three practice that CIOs rate as highly effective in adding value to the business at large. Our top CIOs couldn't agree more - they said communication with the user population at large is indispensable.

There are about as many ways to communicate with users as there are CIOs who do so, but some clear trends show up in the kinds of efforts that work best.

Show and Tell While all our best practices CIO were keen communicators - one CIO said she believed there is no such thing as too much communication. At the highest level, she issues a "State of IT" report each quarter via the organization's intranet, detailing what the technology team did in the previous quarter and what's coming next. The report shows users who are vying for her services what's going on outside their own departments and why IT has said no to certain requests. The report also reveals work done by IT that's easily overlooked by users, such as antivirus projects.

Although the online report was far from a hit initially, she told us she knew she had to keep publishing. "The first time you put something out there, you might not get the response that you expect, but you can't just drop it. You have to keep at it," she said.

This CIO also periodically holds an IT open house, where her team displays technology at work in various areas of the company. Often, an employee from one business department will see an application being used by another group and will think of how to make it work for himself.

These gatherings give users a clearer understanding of how IT works than they can get from just reading a newsletter. "They'll see something and say: 'Hey, I could use that' - You have a new project that is the users' idea, and they have a stake in it," she explained.

Reach Out Remember there is another side to communication: Listening. Make yourself visible and accessible for questions and be prepared to listen to feedback. As one CIO told us: "Just ask the question and shut up." (For more on communication skills, see "What to Communicate? Shut Up and Listen", page 110.)

Keep your ears open for new initiatives going on in other departments - and have your staff do the same, the best practices CIOs said.

One CIO said IT staffers at his company invite themselves to business meetings to find out early what IT can contribute and to send the message that IT wants to be involved in business initiatives. He said if your staff hear of some idea like, say, a new marketing program, they should simply say: "Hey, we might be able to help with that. Can we come?" Sometimes IT can offer assistance, sometimes it can't, he said, but it's likely the time in those meetings will be well spent because it sets the tone that IT should be involved in business initiatives.

Show Them the Money One CIO published articles about IT in the CEO's biweekly newsletter, created a monthly IT newsletter for her company's offices and hosted casual meet-the-technology-team get-togethers; but she still had trouble convincing her business partners and users that her department added value to the organization.

A couple of years ago, she started publishing a quarterly communique called "Dollars and Sense", which she distributes to executives at the company's headquarters. With hard numbers, it details each department's portion of total technology expenditures - from the telephone system on up to large IT projects.

Getting that information together has been a big challenge, but communicating the cost and ultimate worth of what her department does will be invaluable, the CIO said. "It's a way of charging back [costs] without charging back, and of giving users a real understanding of the cost of technology. In the past, their perception was that the technology budget was just for the technology department. But now they see it supports the entire organization. And as they receive this information on a regular basis, we hope they can use it to help make better technology decisions in the future."

Keep an Open Line To foster communication between employees and IT staff, one leading CIO took a page from customer-facing groups, and created a customer advocate position within IT. The advocate spends time with the line users at the plants. The customer advocate is basically an ombudsman," the CIO said. "She's not there to replace the help desk; she's not there just to be yelled at; she's there to talk to our customers and find out what they need."

The new position has helped the IT group build real relationships with the business side, the CIO said. But the customer advocate's ongoing exchange with users has had practical benefits as well. Recently, one plant was trying to upgrade its business planning and control system software, but the customer advocate knew from talking with employees that the plant had done an incredible amount of customization in its initial implementation.

She warned them to wait on the upgrade and spread the word to IT colleagues. "If the plant had just done that upgrade on its own, it probably would have brought the whole place down," the CIO told us.

But simply hiring people to talk to users on a regular basis would be insufficient if the CIO himself wasn't following up with the same kind of relationship-building with the business. He meets at least quarterly with each division's executive to discuss what IT has done for the unit thus far and what it can do in the future.

"You can't put any of these types of communication efforts in place unless you're taking an out-in-front posture," the CIO said. "The CIO can't sit in his office. He can't do it over the telephone. He has to get out and meet with people and say: 'What can I do to help you?'"