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Building Trust between IT and Management (part 1)
To avoid conflicts between IT and management (read my previous post), you need to have a working relationship. And a working relationship requires trust.
Short story:
You, as an IT director are responsible for running the IT, and you are asked to present management your plans for IT for the next three years. You’re annoyed by the fact that you have plans, but the discussion is anyway going to steer towards that ERP project that is still behind schedule. You would also like to change your IT towards a service oriented organization, but last time when you were discussing these IT services, nobody was interested. How do you tackle this situation?
Now, trust builds on two things:
- Predictability of actions and events related to the other party
- Confidence in the other party
In the previous scenario, predictability in that one single ERP project hasn’t been in place. And it’s eating up the whole confidence in your work. And the reason for this is very simple: it’s the most important project in the whole company at the moment. Even though you have your own problems with service desks, applications, creating services for IT etc, you need to have a very strong grip on what is most important for your customers.
So, when presenting your plans, you need to include two things:
- A clear plan for the projects that management is most interested in
- A clear plan for the things you see important for IT itself
In most cases we have seen that the daily, continuous pressure in IT comes more from inside than outside. That’s why many IT organizations are more concentrated on solving their own problems than company problems. But even if you would have that situation, I’m 100% convinced that having a good grip on what management sees important will make it so much easier for you to implement the improvements inside IT as well.
In the next blog, I’ll talk about how IT can present the actual plans and roadmaps.
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