An Approach To Keep Your Focus On The Customer

It is very important that one listens to what the customer says. Listening is divided into 5 stages.  I have used these five stages to devise my model or approach that would help an organization to keep their focus on the customer. This approach is represented below.

Key Reasons For Reactive IT Organization

It is a fact that today most of the IT organizations are reactive. What makes them a reactive organization?

Many organizations have a belief that “Being Proactive” is expensive and does not provide value. Also, business does not see value from IT.

These two points couples together and steers the business’s decision to not to make any additional investment in IT in order to drive the proactive behavior.  Thus, what IT gets is an inappropriate allocation of funding.

Moreover, IT themselves are not sure regarding the business benefits they can bring in by being proactive. This makes it impossible for them to convince the business to make an investment. The situation is further complicated since most of the IT organizations till date are cost centers.

When the profit margins are strained, this status of IT in the overall organization results in IT being one of the first to face the axe. IT generally is the first department that faces tactical cost cutting. This leads to a negative spiral and IT’s image is further degraded. IT attempts to ensure BAU. Their effort goes into ensuring that the downtime is minimized. They take a step farther from pro-activeness.

Cost cutting leads to delay or dropping of new initiatives and retrenching staff. Overall effect is poor or bad staffing.  Hence, the reasons for reactive organizations get compounded. Besides these following points add fuel to the fire making the IT organization even more reactive:

• Misaligned strategic, tactical and operational layers of the organization
• Poor communication across the various organizational layers, groups and teams
• Lack of appreciation, recognition and rewards to employees for proactive initiatives (This makes the employee think that why should one make an effort which is not recognized or appreciated)

Is Your Organization Reactive Or Proactive?

A number of IT organizations believe that they are proactive since they perform some of the activities proactively. So how to tell whether your organization is a reactive or a proactive organizations. Answer to the following questions will help you to judge this.

Q1. Are you often facing the state of fire fighting?

Q2. Are you constantly achieving availability over the committed levels?

Q3. Are you aware about the current IT maturity?

Q4. Do you have evolving processes?

Q5. Is IT objective aligned or integrated with business objectives?

Q6. Does IT speak in the language of TCO and RoI (or ROV) for services?

Q7. Do you focus on customer experience and expectation?

Q8. Are you able to convert outcomes into $ value and showcase the value of IT to business?

Q9. Is your IT organization constantly trying to align itself with changing business needs?

Q10. Do you provide proactive guidance to the business in terms of the new or improved business services (enabled by IT)?

Q11. Is your ratio of automated to manually logged tickets <= 1?

Now rate your answers using the following table:

Q. No.	Score  (Answer = “Yes”)	Score  (Answer = “No”)
1	0	1
2	1	0
3	1	0
4	1	0
5	1	0
6	1	0
7	1	0
8	1	0
9	0	1  (Is proactively aligned)
10	1	0
11	1	0

After rating your answers, sum your score. If your total score is less than 10, it reflects that there is a very high probability that your organization is a reactive organization. Lesser the score greater is the degree of reactiveness.