What Business Wants I.T. to Know

As promised, here's Part 2 from yesterday's post.

Here's 18 things your business wants I.T. to know. I hope both posts become a conversation starter if your I.T. and business relationships are falling short of expectations.

1. Sometimes dealing with you folks is like trying to communicate in a foreign language. Please get rid of the acronyms and speak in terms we can understand.



2. When we request a new application or enhancement, you're always too busy. If we had a better idea of what was on your plate and when the projects were going to be completed, we could do a better job of helping prioritize.

3. We need to work together to better train our employees on our applications. User manuals are NOT getting the job done.

4. We need you involved until we achieve original business benefits expectations from our projects. Simply delivering the enhancement or system isn't enough.

5. We don't have confidence in our systems. Sometimes they go down, then come back up, without explanation. We don't know why it happened, nor what you're doing to make sure it doesn't happen again.

6. You don't measure your performance in ways that are meaningful to US.

7. If we're short with you at Helpdesk, please understand that we're frustrated that some technical issue is preventing us from getting our jobs done and serving our customers. And there's nothing more important than serving our customers.

8. If the same problems occur over and over again, you can understand our lack of confidence in your abilities.

9. It would be helpful if you could let us know well in advance when systems will be down and why.

10. When you've fixed a Helpdesk problem, will you please let us know? Sometimes we're waiting for a solution that has already been delivered without our knowledge!

11. Can we please agree on a common process to evaluate and prioritize I.T. projects? What we have in place at the moment isn't working.

12. Why did we do that last system upgrade? It seems like we had to retrain all our people without any real benefits! We need to discuss this before you simply proceed with it.

13. People are suspicious of what they don't understand. The better you can explain what you do (and why) the more comfortable we will be.

14. We're willing to do whatever it takes to perform better. If you have some ideas, speak up!

15. Please don't close Helpdesk tickets until WE say the problem has been resolved!

16. Why do you always blame convoluded I.T. processes on Sarbanes-Oxley? What is Sarbanes-Oxley and why should we care?

17. Our business spends a lot of time refining business processes, trying to make them lean. Do you do that? If not, why not?

18. if you want to understand how to better serve internal customers, just ask! Provide Helpdesk surveys, Training surveys and Post-Project Forensic surveys and report back what you're doing to improve results the next time. Demonstrate your continuous improvement process.

What would you add to the list?