Does your internal IT team get in the way of you serving your customers?
Customer facing teams rely heavily on the IT team to setup technology to interact with the customer.
Depending on the size of the company, the IT team can be a large or small team. IT teams are sometimes external. And rely on vendor relationships.
As a result, they can be an arms length from the business concerns of your team. From your team who is serving your customers.
IT doesn’t always respond to your concerns fast enough
IT is often stretched to the limit of their capacity. And have competing priorities. Priorities that are outside of your team.
They often just don’t respond fast enough.
Yet, it’s you that has egg on their face when things just don’t work.
You are the one having to explain it to the customer. Or explain to the customer why you can’t do something they need you to do. Or why what they need takes so long.
It’s why I am an advocate of having a level of technical capability in business teams.
Breaking the traditional mode that IT does it all. Because, after all, they don’t get it all done.
Certainly, IT is best positioned to deal with the heavy lifting of technology. Infrastructure. Security. Data integrity. Vendor management. So, that can shift their priorities and responses to your concerns.
A new way of working in collaboration with IT
In the past, when business teams implemented things themselves, this was often called shadow IT.
Frowned on the technical teams in the organization because if often landed back on their lap to fix it when it didn’t work. Happening organically because the business teams have the frontline view of what helps unlock value for the customer.
Frowned on when it exposed risks for those high priority items. Those things that the IT team rightly focus on. Infrastructure. Security. Data integrity.
So, what is the best way forward?
Part of a good digital strategy plan considers this. A cross functional sharing of responsibilities. For example, selecting platforms that include no code or low code solutions do that a champion on the business team can tweak where tweaks are needed.
The ideal is to focus everyone on serving your customers
Possibly an ideal. In theory it’s a great approach. In practice it needs commitment and ongoing refinement to make it work.
Certainly, it requires a culture that focuses on customer centricity over functional territories. Everyone focused on serving your customers as a high priority.
What happens in your company? Do the business teams and IT teams collaborate or collide?
