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I was invited to a management group meeting at one of our customers’ some time ago. The idea was to discuss how reports for the management could be improved and how we could be of assistance.
I arrived at the meeting with my colleagues and met the customer’s CIO and IT manager outside the meeting room. We exchanged a few words before entering the meeting room, and they were clearly a bit nervous and not sure what to expect.
 Things got interesting inside the meeting room. My colleagues and I sat at the table with the CFO and other directors, while the CIO and IT manager went to sit in the back corner of the room, even though there were plenty of seats at the table. The CFO opened the discussion around reporting and what we could do to help the management board understand better what’s going on in IT. We asked a couple questions about what they would like to achieve. Every time, the CFO or directors said they wanted some basic things like understanding what is going on and who is responsible for which area, the CIO commented from the corner a bit defensively that they had done all the requested things, and such and such reports about it had been sent to the management.
One of the directors openly challenged the CIO’s lack of plans, to which the CIO immediately replied by stating that he had sent the service plans already a year ago but no one had bothered to approve them. The directors said that they only see lists of things sent by IT, lists that don’t really tell them anything, to which the CIO retorted that nothing else has been asked for. The CIO also stated that he’s been around in the industry for over 20 years and that things were easier when they only had mainframe computers.
Finally, my colleague challenged the CFO, what if he was asked to save 30% of the budget. Would he know where that 30% could be taken off and what the consequences of that would be? The CFO said “Now you’re speaking my language!” .
The conversation was precisely as heated as described above. Both sides were throwing curve balls and batting, but there was no-one catching any of those balls. This was a text-book example of IT and business not speaking the same language.
Eventually things cooled down, but as you could probably already guess, reporting is not the problem. And I said that during the meeting as well. Reporting is an important tool to open up a situation, but if the lack of trust is as clear as in this case, you need to untangle some of the underlying knots before reporting can really help. Most probably the situation in this customer company had slowly but steadily deteriorated, and now when the times were rough, it all surfaced.
All in all, the meeting went well and we got an understanding of what was expected, what their situation was, and what we could do for them. But even if the meeting was fruitful, I could see that the situation was far from easy for them. It’s clear that they first need to solve one very big problem: the total lack of trust. And it all starts by taking a deep breath and starting to create a common language.
What is the common language? How do you create one? This will be the topic for my next blog.
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