IT Conference Highlights Importance of Communications for Successful Roll-outs
| by Dan Davison | ||||
Sitting here at Soulard Barber Shop Saturday morning, I am reflecting on the IT Innovation Conference I attended last week in St. Louis. First of all, it was satisfying to see more than 500 IT professionals, infrastructure managers, staffing providers, storage, and computing vendors and CIOs gathered at a regional conference amidst the poor economic news of our time. But it made sense, in light of the “glimmer of a turnaround” described in the closing keynote by CIO magazine publisher emeritus Gary Beach. Perhaps those who showed up had sensed the same. It was reassuring.
But even more reassuring was the talk of planned projects and ongoing implementations. One company was bringing a supplier management program on line. Another was doubling data center capacity to support an anticipated spike in consumer demand. Yet another was implementing an electronic records conversion across dozens of hospitals. (Check out the meeting agenda.) What was reassuring was not only the volume of activity presented in sessions and discussed in the hallways, but also the realization—in demonstrable, robust terms—to what exactly is required for success: great communications.
More so than in years past, project managers showed how they involved users from the very beginning, long before requirements were set or vendors were selected. They described involving users in large collaborative sessions to define requirements and evaluate vendors against requirements. One healthcare company went so far as to invite three vendors in for a long weekend of product demonstrations and working sessions, and hundreds of professional employees showed up voluntarily on their weekend to participate!
Nobody wants to feel like an IT implementation was done to them. Users need to feel buy-in, like they helped design the solution. If they designed it, they will use it, and you will get a return on your IT investment, now, and throughout the system’s life. Since every system falls short in some ways, users must be committed to helping you improve the system. That implies that you, the project champion, have a communications plan. And that plan has to foster three-point communication:
- You gather input, often from users.
- You reflect back what you heard in some demonstrable way, such as in a beta test or feature set.
- Your user acknowledges—ultimately through increased usage—that you heard them and acted appropriately.
No matter how great your technology, communications must be robust. Prior to launch, gather input. Reflect what you heard with written requirements. Involve users in source selection and beta demonstrations. Build in channels for active and frequent user response. If users are not coming to you, go to them. That’s what so many of this year’s conference presenters demonstrated.
Read about next year’s IT conference in Saint Louis.
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Business Improvement Services • Business Training Seminars • Customer Quality • Strategy
Tags:
buy in • customer • Customer Quality • IT Implementation • Strategy • value proposition • voice of the customer
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Originally published in 2009 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title IT Conference Highlights Importance of Communications for Successful Roll-outs. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com
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