In the C-Suite: Are you being served?
Service is an abstract concept. It comes in many different flavours including poor, premium and luxury. Hidden behind help desks and sandbags, with a physical DMZ (different floor/continent from users), it is plain to see that service isn’t at the top of many CIOs’ agendas.
Can I suggest that service from an IT department is scoped as follows: At one end the role of the IT function is to keep the directors out of prison. There is an inextricable link between IT and corporate governance.
At the other end the IT function needs to directly support the vital signals that business leaders use to monitor business health. Thus CIOs need to spend as much time (if not more) focusing on business KPIs rather as on IT function KPIs.
This means complete alignment of business KPIs and IT function processes. When a technologist addresses an infrastructure incident or an application upgrade, they need to be crystal clear on how their work contributes to the organisation’s strategic imperatives.
If CIOs are to get to the top table, they need to address service first.
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Spot on! I would go as far as to say that while many CIOs, not to mention CEOs, don’t realize it, service, or more accurately, the customer experience is the single greatest determinant of a company’s success. After all, without customers you have no business being in business.
By my way of thinking the primary role of the CIO is to make it easy for customers to do business with their organization and easy for the people in their organizations to do business with their customers.
It’s all about service.