7 Steps to Excellent Service Delivery

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I'm sure you remember the times your email system slowed to a crawl or one of your
business applications crashed. A senior vice-president of an electronics manufacturing
company told me that when this happened to him, he said to himself, "If the CIO were
standing in front of me right now, I would give him a piece of my mind." Read on to find
out how CIOs get themselves into this dilemma and discover a process you can use to
excel at service delivery and gain the trust of your C- suite colleagues.

Why Delivering Excellent Services to the Business is Important

Newly appointed CIOs have a lot of energy. Believe me. I've met many of them.
Adrenalin levels are high and each is eager to help fellow C-suite executives improve
business outcomes. If you are a newly appointed CIO, heed my advice. Creating
business value is not a sprint. It is a journey. It is an important lesson. You need to be
cautious when first approaching business executives with an earnest desire to help. You
need to find out if your IT organization performs well at the basic blocking and tackling
that keeps the business running each and every day. If you do not, then you may end
up with the following outcome that a marketing vice president shared with me.

 Kathy, the Marketing Senior Vice President of a consumer goods company, met with
John, the new CIO who was just two weeks on the job. His opening pitch was to share
with Kathy how he can help Kathy's team improve their customer reach by leveraging
technology. What John didn't know was that just one day before, Kathy was accessing a
marketing analysis application that crashed within 20 seconds. This was not the first
time it happened. What do you think Kathy said to John, the newly appointed CIO,
about his desire to help her? I think you can guess. Let me tell you exactly what she
said to John.

"John, yesterday our marketing analysis app crashed for the third time in two weeks.
When your organization can provide a level of service for the basic applications my
department use on a daily basis, without crashing every few days, I'll talk to you about
how you can help me. In the meantime, improve the delivery of services you provide.
Otherwise, I will be talking to your successor."
Mike Hedges, the successful CIO of Medtronic, shared his thoughts with me about the
need to deliver services without disruption. He said, "CIOs will never partner or build
credibility with the business if the IT organization delivers services to the business that
disrupts daily work activities." Delivering services exceptionally well is a basic tenet for
every CIO. It's the first phase of the four-phase strategic IT organization transformation
process I wrote about in my previous article, Can Strategic CIOs Create a Renaissance
Revolution?

A  7 Step Process To Deliver Exceptional Service to the Business

CIOs can utilize a seven- step process that is logical and deliverables-driven to improve
the delivery of services to the business. Let us examine how a newly appointed CIO
addressed the challenge of improving the delivery of services to the business.

Steve O'Connor is CIO at CSAA Insurance Group in California. O'Connor is a seasoned

CIO with a stellar career in IT as well as business. O'Connor explained to me the steps
he took to "understand the business and provide the best level of service required to
achieve business success."

1. Identify Business and Commodity Services Required By Business Units.

O'Conner spent the first 90 days with business leaders. O'Connor told his team,"My
objective is to meet with leaders of the Marketing, Sales, Finance, and other key
business units to understand the business, the competitive marketplace, and the
specific services each business unit needs to achieve their objectives."

2. Identify Key Stakeholders and Priority for Each Business Service

O'Connor scheduled a second round of individual meetings with each vice president
and their staffs. He told each executive that his objective for the meeting "is to validate
the list of business services, the key stakeholders, and level of service required."

3. Develop Enterprise List of Business Services

O'Connor and his team developed a consolidated list of all the business services
required for each business unit. He debriefed the IT Directors about why this activity
was important. He told them, "we included the priority of the services as well as our
understanding of the value of the business service provided." He then reviewed the
completed template with the vice-presidents and made modifications as required.
4. Socialize Across Enterprise

O'Connor scheduled a meeting with the executive team to present the results of his
interviews. He shared with me the four objectives for the meeting:

1. Communicate that I understand the business services required to support the major
processes of the company.

 2. Share the level of service required by the business to meet their goals.

 3. Gain consensus from the executive team as to the priorities the IT organization
should focus on.

4. Reinforce to the executive team that the goal of IT is to be an integral part of the
business team and focus on supporting the business needs of the organization.

5. Develop / Execute Work Plan

O'Connor gathered his service delivery A- team that included IT and business unit
personnel to review the data collected during the previous few months and develop a
realistic work plan. He told the team, "I want to make sure we co-develop the plan so
we get buy-in from the executive team and business unit leaders."

6. Measure Service Delivery

O'Connor and his IT/Business team developed a set of SLA's (Service Level
Agreements) to measure the performance of each service at the root level. His
philosophy is simple. He told me, "I want to get at the root problem for every service
disruption. If you solve the root problem, the disruptions will not reoccur."

7. Continuously Improve

Every successful executive knows that implementing a continuous improvement

program is a smart thing to do. This is an excellent method for improving performance.
O'Connor explains why this is important. "I developed a 360-degree process to evaluate
regularly the level of service. This provided all the key stakeholders, IT service owners,
business owners, and business users the opportunity to be part of a service delivery
improvement program." O'Connor succeeded at improving service delivery and gaining
the trust of his business peers.

ENDING

Every CIO wants to succeed. The first order of business, if you want to work
successfully with your C-suite colleagues as a business partner and not as a cost
center, is to gain the trust of the business. The choice is yours. Use the seven-step
process that other CIOs successfully used to deliver exceptional service to the
business. With this foundation, you can continue your journey to become a strategic
CIO. You can read more about this subject and how strategic CIOs leverage information
 and technology in my book, The Strategic CIO: Changing the Dynamics of the Business
Enterprise.
Related: 

 CIO Role

 IT Leadership

Phil Weinzimer is president of Strategere Consulting and works with clients to develop

business and IT strategies that focus on achieving business outcomes. He has written
two books, the most recent, The Strategic CIO: Changing the Dynamics of the Business
Enterprise.  , focuses on how strategic CIOs leverage information and technolog for
competitive advantage. Additionally, he writes articles on strategic IT, including one for
CIO Magazine, co-authored a Harvard Case Study, conducts video interview series for
Sarder TV-IT Strategtic Thought Leaders-and for Accelerating IT Success-The Strategic
CIO: Managing in the 21st Century, as well as speaks at CIO events on IT Strategy and
How Strategic CIOs are Changing the Dynamics of the Business Enterprise.
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