Managing IT’s business relationships

IT departments need to take a cue from partner organizations in terms of engaging with, transforming and servicing their customers i.e., their business functions. They need an approach parallel to the Account Management approach of partners. 

We call it Business Relationship Management (BRM). IT needs to continuously and keenly engage with business functions to get early insights into business ambitions, plans, new initiatives etc.; as well as to identify the pain areas in their performance. Engaging in the Pains and Plans of business functions happens when a Business Relationship Manager is continuously engaged. 

I inherited a very lean IT department. The first challenge I faced the lack of regular engagement points between vast spread of the company and the lean manpower in IT department. We tactically assigned additional responsibilities to everyone in the department mapping them to business functions and started setting up the business relationship processes.

Business Relationship Processes & KPI

Like any critical function, business relationship also, has to be driven by processes and KPIs. Some of the processes could be:

• Project proposals prioritization process – evaluation and prioritization ranking of projects
• Business case mentoring and getting them to approvals phase
• Program governance with business – timely execution of projects
• IT services governance – Service KPIs
• Budgeting – run, grow, transform functions – fair cost allocations, prioritizations, and moderating conflicts with help of business leaders
• Business value realization process – Business Value score
• Communication process – anchoring the IT communication process to divisional one
• Leadership governance process – engaging with leaders, Governance score

You don’t have to roll out all the above at once. As your business relationship function matures, these processes will also mature, and the need for new processes will arise. 

Empowerment

Any relationship management can quickly turn into a coordination or brokering process without much powers. For a function to become strong, they need to have certain decision-making powers which put them on equal footing with other decision makers. 

Make sure that you delegate the business-related IT powers like decisions, allocations, prioritizations, to the BRMs. 

Empowerment was a key concern for anyone taking the BRM role and we carefully designed the decisions that a BRM could take. We delegated the power to prioritize IT assets within the function. We delegated the power to prioritize change requests and do any local, urgent, location-specific changes with local teams. They were empowered to prioritize the location- specific IT services demand to be fulfilled with local resources. 

Business Leader Empowerment

With IT empowerment, you must also seek empowerment from the business leaders they are connected with. This comes in the form of a “seat on the table” – the BRM becoming part of the staff (direct reports) of the leader.

As we built the BRM cadre, I met each of the business leaders personally. I requested them to treat the BRM as their direct report and provide the necessary mandate and empowerment to him/her, to drive the transformation through IT. The BRMs started participating in daily/weekly/monthly meetings as direct reports of leaders. Like any other staff member, they got opportunity to present to the leadership team about IT plans and pains. They used participation in management team to drive discussions, decisions and actions on process changes, master data issues, streamline inter-departmental coordination and enforcing usage compliance.   

BRM needs to be empowered by both the IT leadership and business leadership in order to drive holistic execution, adoption and enabling process/organizational changes within the function. Tying all of this together are KPIS of Business Value Realization, which should be owned by the BRM.

BRM Collaboration

In the world of digital transformation, with projects transitioning to products, BRMs can become the product-owners on behalf of business, collaborating with technology product teams. BRMs can play a key role in bringing the product mindset as an interlocutor between IT and business functions. 

All digital transformations are fundamentally business transformations. You require the bridges between business functions and technology to ensure that your transformations are not just technological, but true-blue business transformations. Build a BRM cadre, processes and governance to drive a sustainable digital transformation journey.

BRM Talent Pastures

The final question is – where are the BRMs? Where to find them.

I started looking around for people who were passionate about process efficiencies and had the biggest demand from IT. These are the people who are deeply engaged in processes as process champions; and in the pursuit of processes, they also have learnt the technologies supporting these. I handpicked such tech-passioned talent and brought them to IT function as BRMs.

The right talent for BRMs are people passionate about processes, self-learners of technology and are the go-to people within business functions for either solving users’ technology issues; or for taking these up with IT.

The bridge between IT capabilities and business value lies in a special cadre of people who have the necessary skills and capabilities to understand both, drive meaningful business-technology conversations; govern the relationship, and make transformation happen. These are your Business Relationship Managers. Build, empower and nurture the processes and people running your business relationships to drive your digital transformation.

I hope you find this article useful. Please leave your comments here, or in the author’s LinkedIn Posts.

The article has been written by Jagdish Belwal, Founder and CEO, Jagdish Belwal Advisory