Midwave Creates a Road Map to Success for IT Management and Business Executives
Our Client
Founded in the 1870’s, the client is a premiere manufacturer of products that include equipment used to maintain indoor and outdoor surfaces and coatings for repairing, protecting and adding beauty to concrete floors as well as equipment parts, service, maintenance and financing.
The client has worldwide marketing and manufacturing operations. World headquarters are located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the USA; and European headquarters are in Antwerp, Belgium. They have manufacturing and logistics facilities in Kentucky, Michigan and Minnesota in the USA. They also have facilities in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and China.
Our Client’s Dilemma
New IT management was brought into the company with a mandate: create a more powerful Internet presence, complete with e-commerce and better servicing of customers, which their current applications simply couldn’t do.
The new IT team was full of energy and ideas. They had been brought in from e-commerce-focused companies. Unfortunately, these new IT people came in speaking a language that the manufacturing-focused, hard numbers business management simply didn’t understand. All out culture-clash ensued and the relationship became combative.
Midwave’s Rapid Response Solution
Midwave understood the path both groups wanted to travel but with both parties speaking different languages, Midwave had to both translate and provide a framework for negotiations. Eventually, the business group began to develop a more positive relationship with IT rather than a combative one.
One of the business team’s biggest complaints was that IT kept buying more storage. With no understanding of why the increased storage was needed but seeing large expenditures for more, it was a constant source of conflict. Midwave did an analysis to find out who the big storage users were and why.
As it turned out, it was the business executives themselves that were using the majority of storage. They had large amounts of corporate information coming in for analysis and were storing it. Midwave began a process of asking what data should be kept, what data should be archived, and what should (and legally could) be destroyed. From this, Midwave helped them develop a data management policy. With an understanding of the need for the storage and a justification for the expenditures, business and IT finally found common ground.
Midwave’s diplomats create a road map to success
During the negotiations, Midwave proposed an idea that would expand the “common ground” idea and help both sides get what they needed. Everyone needed to change their perception of IT’s function within the company. The business group needed to be more flexible and the IT group needed to be more responsive.
How did Midwave bring this “paradigm shift” about? First, they changed the way the company perceived IT. Instead of “providing storage,” IT was providing data availability service. Instead of email, they were providing messaging services. Instead of putting a phone on someone’s desk, they were providing customer contact services.
An internal service desk creates measurable performance
The next obvious step was to create an internal service desk so various business departments had a specific place where they could order these business services from the IT department. This created a documentation system that allowed the company to track these services and put a monetary value on them. In other words, “this service is being provided to you at this cost and you’re getting this performance from it.”
With concrete metrics to measure performance, both sides had common ground around which to negotiate. A much more positive and peaceful relationship grew out of it.