Business 101 Tour Now Departing

At AIMCO, CIO Scott Wesson always tells his new hires, "You can never forget what the A in AIMCO stands for." It stands for "apartments"; that's what the $1.5 billion real estate management company is all about. Wesson routinely takes new hires out to a Denver-area apartment building to get a sense of the business. He used to take staff on a tour of the facility and call it a day; now he takes the field trip a step further. He invites a business leader to run the tour and talk about what success looks like from his or her perspective. "It's become more of a dialog around business challenges, which gets the IT staff focused immediately on business and customer needs," says Wesson.

Besides learning what the business is about, CIOs want their staff to understand the impact of system success and failure. "I want IT to feel like they are there to serve a greater [business] purpose and not just to connect network cords to specific jacks," says Tennant. "If they can take a problem and think in business terms, then that's a very different thought pattern." For example, instead of seeing a "system going down," they should see its impact on our ability to get people their medication, says Tennant. After such service disruptions, Tennant's team visits with the business function most affected by the outage for a formal debriefing. The discussion focuses on the business impact of the disruption rather than the technical problems. "Next, my staff participates in a brainstorming session with the business about different ways we can mitigate risk -- whether it's having hard copies of medication forms or communicating with our third-party provider to provide medication information," says Tennant.

Gibson sees the change in mind-set in his everyday conversations with his staff and on paper in annual self-appraisals and project retrospectives. "My team is now assessing their activities and success and framing it in business terms, not in technical terms," says Gibson. When I see this shift in communication, I know that everything we're doing to foster business sensibility is working."