Align Your Technology Services with Your Organization’s Goals

Our Client was the brand-new CIO of a large organization. She was being bombarded with “feedback” from all directions about what she needed to “fix” in IT. Her gut said that IT needed to regroup and refocus, but how was she to know what the real problems were, what was working well, what was significant, and what was just “noise”?

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Our first step was to interview stakeholders within the organization, as well as IT leaders and IT staff. With our survey, we wanted to understand current perceptions of IT and be able to substantiate or refute them with real data. We then identified all the functional areas within IT, developing specific, actionable questions within each area. Finally, we tested the survey to make sure that all the questions were easily understood. The golden rules are:

• Make it short & sweet (the questions are straightforward, and the survey takes less than 10 minutes to complete)
• Make it anonymous
• Make each question about one thing
• And make it actionable!

The first year the survey was deployed, the results clearly showed how the organization perceived IT and its services. With analysis of the survey data, we were able to provide the Client with recommended areas for attention. This made it possible for the CIO to not only decide what improvement efforts her teams needed to make, but also which were most critical to address. The first year’s survey provided the baseline against which we measure future years. Each subsequent year, depending on organizational and IT goals and efforts, a few questions were sometimes added, but just for that year. Over the years, the survey results have provided key focus areas to be tackled by cross-functional teams and have resulted in significant measurable improvements. 

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By deploying the survey each year, we have been able to trend our Client’s data year-over-year and show progress and identify new or ongoing areas needing attention. Not only is IT soliciting feedback from its “customers” to better understand their needs, but they are also demonstrating that they “hear” these needs through the ongoing implementation of improvement efforts. As IT continues to ask for feedback about how to be a better partner to the organization, the organization has also increasingly included IT in its planning and strategy meetings – a true win-win.