Yesterday I attended a CIO roundtable with the Society of Information Management (SIM) and the discussion was on building relationships with our business counterparts. While both of the presenters discussed different organizational structures, challenges and approaches, they both stressed the need to build trust and credibility.
You build trust and credibility by doing the following:
1) Focus on delivering exceptional core services. Your CEO is not going to want to discuss IT strategy with you if her laptop keeps crashing and she can't get a response from the help desk.
2) Under promise and over deliver. As IT professionals we love to develop solutions and are often overly optimistic about how long it will take us to get work done. How many times have you been confident about the work in front of you when you get hit with a gotcha-the new technology is more complicated than you anticipated; your lead developer just went out on an extended medical leave; or the vendor is not delivering what they promised? You then find yourself informing your customer that you will be late on the project. How about anticipating that there will be some type of gotcha along the way and extending the timeline beyond what you think you can deliver?
3) Be honest. I loved the part in Randy Pausch's book The Last Lecture where he wrote that if he only had two final words, they would be: "be honest" and if he had five final words: "be honest all the time". It isn't always easy to be honest. Sometimes it means you have to admit that you were wrong or you have to deliver bad news or you have to tell someone something about themselves that really stings. However, I can't think of a higher compliment than being known as someone of integrity.
As IT professionals we spend our time discussing lofty topics of governance or IT strategy, but if we haven't built trust and credibility with our business partners, none of these other things will matter.
Happy Holidays.
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Mary Finlay is the deputy chief Information officer of Partners HealthCare System, Inc., responsible for the daily management of an organization of 1,300 IS and telecommunications staff. Previously, she was the chief information officer of Brigham and Women's Hospital. She is also a member of the faculty for the Simmons School of Management.
Finlay is the chair of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council and is active in the Boston Chapter of the Society of Information Management and the College of HealthCare Information Management Executives. She has been recognized with leadership awards from the Simmons School of Management, CIO, the New England Business and Technology Association, and Babson College.
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