IT is capable of being a true enabler in any size organization. At Iron Mountain, we know that certain conditions and priorities must be met for us to successfully execute this.
Our IT organization, for example, must build strong relationships with others in the business. We do this through business-savvy IT executives whose responsibilities include working as a liaison between IT and other business units to understand their pain points and the company strategy. This enables us to be a more consultative organization, proactively providing ideas and opportunities for how we can accelerate their business outcomes.
[ Are you trying to build this reputation in your organization? See our related story: Grady Health CIO: How to build a partnership mentality. ]
We also need to be trusted and valued — two qualities that we earn through executing on opportunities to continuously deliver and meet or exceed expectations. Both of these are contingent on evolving our skill sets to learn to listen more, ask the right questions, and fortify our business knowledge. Only then are we truly considered a business partner, and only then are we truly able to make an impact.
IT is unique in that it’s one of the few organizations that has a true end-to-end line of sight to almost everything that happens in a business. That comes with a set of responsibilities because we’re able to help connect the dots and help with the messaging across the various business units and business lines.
To help us deliver, we’ve identified five top priorities that we believe will help us move that needle, in both the eyes of our internal customers and our external customers:
1. Focus on user experience
We want every user experience we touch to be seamless and intuitive. This includes everything from resolving help desk calls and holding meetings with a member of our IT organization to deploying a piece of technology.
2. Always be business-focused
At the end of the day, IT is a service-based organization, and we need to deliver those services and technologies in order to drive or create business value. We need to make sure that we keep the business context in mind in everything we do.
3. Prioritize delivery excellence
How do we deliver high-quality services and capabilities in a reliable and predictable way every day? A former colleague of mine referred to this as the say-do ratio. Are we actually doing what we said we would do, and do we set high expectations for ourselves?
4. Be agile
We want to aim to become more flexible. How do we embrace minimum viable products and minimum viable processes so we can deliver value quicker? How do we iterate to deliver subsequent value? How do we implement something into the business quicker and sooner so they can begin to realize value?
5. Showcase IT
We strive to develop an organization where Iron Mountain sales and marketing professionals are comfortable putting our IT leaders and practitioners in front of their customers. We want to tell this story — about how we’re using Iron Mountain products and services and how we’re leading our organization in world-class ways. We want to be a trusted member of the broader IT community. If there are things my team and I can share with other IT organizations that can help them accelerate their own strategy, that’s a lot of goodwill coming from Iron Mountain.
Want more wisdom like this, IT leaders? Sign up for our weekly email newsletter.
