Building the Customer-Driven IS Department: A Practical Guide to Managing the Whole Business/IS Relationship
Keisley Harris
November 30, 1998 148 Pages - SKU: KH213381
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The practices of successful market-oriented businesses can be adapted to the needs of an IS department to achieve prosperous customer relationships. Using this simple but original approach, this guide examines the principles and practices of managing the business/IS relationship. It examines principles, but, above all, it aims to be practical. In order to help convert principles into practice it goes into specific 'how to' detail and includes questionnaires, checklists, workshop agendas, example outputs, and other similar tools.
"Many IS departments want to make a business contribution but find it difficult to gain the business's permission to do so. They therefore have to fall back on making a technical contribution only, but they are frustrated because they feel this does not allow them to maximize the value they can add to their organization."
The above quote from the guide illustrates the difficulty faced by IS departments in managing their business relationships effectively. The guide has been written to help. It adopts a simple but original approach to managing the business/IS relationship. Its premise is that the practices of successful market-oriented businesses can be adapted to the needs of an IS department and can achieve for IS the same end result: successful customer relationships.
Contents include:
Marketing principles: an outline of general marketing principles and a way of applying these that is tightly geared to the specific needs of IS.
Positioning: how to draw out customer views of the way IS is positioned now and of the way they would prefer IS to be positioned; using this to define a target positioning for IS; how to actually bring about the target positioning.
Contact management: ways of getting customer feedback, acting on it, and communicating to customers the value of your actions; formal methods and informal methods.
Relationship planning: step-by-step guidance on producing a relationship plan and on ensuring it is implemented.
Organization: organization structures can have a considerable effect on an IS department's customer orientation; different organizational options and their pros and cons.
Product: how to manage your portfolio of service offerings in a way that is sensitive to customer needs and views and which measures the improvements you introduce.
Promotion: strategic promotion (i.e. in support of your positioning) and less formal promotion; a structured approach to all promotional activity; principles of internal promotion.
Price: is charging right for you and, if so, how do you do it in a way that assists rather than hinders customer relationships?
The guide is designed to help IS directors and other managers responsible for the business/IS relationship to:
Really understand what the business wants from its IS department
Act on what you learn in a way that will bring you closer to the business.
Convince the business that IS is a responsive and constructive partner.
Convert all this into a coherent approach to managing the whole business/IS relationship, based on a simple, but original, model.
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- The marketing approach to being customer driven
- The marketing model for an IS department
- Positioning
- Contact management
- Producing a marketing plan
- Organization
- Product
- Promotion
- Price
- Implementation checklists
- Consultancy assistance
- Conclusions
Appendices
- 360 degree positioning - example
- Ideas for business-partner positioning
- Informal customer-feedback campaigns
- Example marketing plan
- Candidates for centralization in a federal model
- Ideas for promotional activity
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