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Business leaders often expect their technology teams to perform wonders. Technology leaders want business leaders to better understand their world. It’s no secret that business and technology professionals need to improve their relationships. The question is how.
According to Broadridge, 2023 Digital Transformation and Next Generation Technology Survey, half of all business leaders say they don’t have a clear enough picture of IT’s role in digital transformation. Meanwhile, more than a third of technology leaders say business leaders need to learn more about technology’s capabilities and limitations.
Many companies try to bridge these gaps by changing titles and responsibilities. In other words, the product manager becomes the product owner and becomes the intermediary. IT process managers and business requirements managers are the intermediaries between business and technology. These changes are a good start, but we are still reaching our limits.
In my role as Chief Technology Officer at Broadridge, I think about these issues every day. The success of technology transformation projects depends as much on understanding and collaboration between departments and individuals as on pure technical execution. Achieving that understanding and cooperation requires a skillful combination of the right goals, strategies, communication channels, and organizational structures.
Based on my experience overseeing Broadridge’s enterprise-wide engineering, delivery, and technology operations, I have some best practices and new ideas to help put your company on the right path in each of these critical areas. has been developed.
Goal: Focus on business outcomes
Leadership and technology teams approach problems and projects from different perspectives based on their unique roles. These differences can cause internal friction, slow change efforts and undermine results. The best way to overcome this challenge is for both sides to align on the same big goals.
To some extent, we place too much emphasis on the cost and return on investment (ROI) of major technology programs. Of course, both are very important to track. But ultimately, what matters most is the impact on business outcomes. Framing change projects in terms of improving business performance provides a goal that everyone in the organization can rally around. Setting clear, quantifiable, and achievable business goals for technology projects aligns the interests of all departments within the organization. Leadership teams will be more patient with disruption from technology development and implementation if they understand how the change will directly benefit the business. When technology teams know that the success of a project is primarily determined by how well a new technology helps improve specific business outcomes, they become more responsive to business unit needs.
Strategy: Prioritize impact
Projects that improve business outcomes build momentum for future transformation. When everyone in an organization realizes that one technology initiative has a positive impact on business performance, the entire workforce becomes more enthusiastic about further innovation.
That’s why it’s usually wise to structure your technology transformation strategy as a series of short-term initiatives that deliver tangible results relatively quickly. It’s much easier to align business and technology teams around short-term projects and goals. When it comes to long-term plans and large-scale programs, the disconnect between the two groups becomes more common and pronounced.
However, the size and scope of the effort is not the only deciding factor. When prioritizing your technology efforts, you need to consider which ones will have the greatest impact on your business. For example, let’s look at legacy environments. Digitizing legacy platforms is expensive, disruptive, and often takes years of work. However, it has a huge impact on the business and provides significant cost savings by removing technical debt. The trick is to break down the big goal of upgrading a legacy platform into a series of smaller initiatives, allowing technology teams to work with business leaders to approach each challenge systematically and deliver incremental value faster in the process. It is to do so.
Communication channels: Encourage agile feedback
There is another important benefit to a transformation strategy that is based on short-term projects that deliver significant business outcomes. This means that both business and technology experts will have the opportunity to provide feedback that will guide future development efforts. Building a culture that incorporates elements of agile design provides a continuous flow of input that helps you identify and solve immediate problems and make important course corrections to your long-term strategy.
Organizational Structure: Two-in-a-Box
Broadridge has leveraged several new solutions to break down barriers between business leaders and technology teams. My personal favorite is the “two-in-a-box” model. In a 2 in a box approach, a project always includes his two managers. One is on the technical side, and the other is on the product side. This applies to all levels of the organization. I share the “box” with Martin Koopman, Chief Product Officer at Broadridge. In recent years, we’ve taken this concept more literally, building physical boxes in our North American offices and allowing team members to take “two-in-a-box” photos. We are currently rolling them out internationally. It’s fun to see product and technology teams taking photos inside their boxes and sharing them across the organization. But beyond light-heartedness, these photos serve a more important role: showing everyone in the company that business and technology are working together.
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