Serving in an IT department of a non-IT company, I learned over the years one or two things about our business partners, who are our best friend and patrons, at the same time our ultimate source of headaches.

Bittersweet Partnership

After all, my job is to help them to be successful in their fields, in Sales, Marketing, Finance or Service. In a sense, IT department exists only because our business partners need us. And we need them too, to define the requirements and specs, to decide about the business logics, to promote the products we developed, to sponsor our projects, to give us feedbacks for improvements, etc. So, it’s truly a partnership.

However, we constantly fight with our business partners. They want too much from us within unrealistic short time. We insist on an absolutely necessary infrastructure change they don’t understand and consider too risky. We are furious that they keep changing their mind about the requirements in the last minute. They are bitter about the delay of the new release. This list can go on and on.

Bad guy, good guy

Standing in IT’s shoes (even dress like a developer), I used to think it’s all their fault. They are too picky, technically ignorant, inflexible and simply arrogant. Until one day, I was asked to sit with one of our service representative in the service center, who is responsible for answering client’s calls. She must type in client’s data as fast as she can and answer client’s questions at the same time. She has to be quick because other clients were waiting in the call incoming queues and the average time to handle one call was tracked. To accomplish all her tasks, she relied on the computer and the software, which we produced and maintained. She had to apologize to the client if she couldn’t find the information she needed or it took too long to load up a screen. I can understand how frustrated she was when the software gave her an error she didn’t understand at all.

That experience totally opened up my eyes and I started to see things through the eyes of our business partners. As application users, they don’t understand and don’t want to understand how many cutting-edge technologies we put into the system, how many servers we have setup for an application, and even how many sleepless night we spent to guarantee a smooth release. They see the application as a block box, which provides the necessary functionalities they need to do their jobs. They only care if the application behaves as expected, is available when needed and allows them to login as quickly as possible.So, they are not the bad guys who just want to make our life miserable. They just want us to solve their problems without giving them more troubles.

Root cause

The biggest challenges are the differences between us. We have different tasks in hand. We see things from different view points. We have different criteria for success. We have different expertise and we don’t even speak the same language! When IT people start to talk about the Web Services, RMI invocations and Object-Relational Mapping, our business partners just get dumfounded.This difference by nature caused distrust between IT and Business.

Sometimes, the “black box” idea is leveraged to IT’s benefits. We sneak in the new technologies we would like to learn in the next release. We don’t tell Business about the infrastructure change because they don’t need to know. Well, things blew up. The new technology has some unexpected bug that crashed the application for specific clients. The new server IT rolled in over the weekend processed one third of the client data wrong. Business doesn’t ever trust IT any more. They scrutiny any changes IT propose and become suspicious about any thing IT tells them.

A group of people are brought on board to solve this communication issue between IT and Business. They are the business analyst and the project managers in IT side. In business side, some of them start to accumulate some technical expertise and become the contact person or user champion to represent business when IT needs to be dealt with.This new middle layer is supposed to smooth the operation between IT and Business. However, another issue arises. IT people starts to tell business how to do business and Business people starts to mandate IT how to design the software and the system. Because people think they know enough to have some control on the other side.

Solution

So, can two people from totally different background work well together and develop a productive partnership? Yes, at least the famous book about relationship, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, says so. If a man and a woman, who are designed by nature totally differently can work together to organize a highly productive unit (called Family), why cannot IT and Business work together effectively?

Here are some of the suggestions based on my experience.

Fundamental

Shared goal/vision

Find the common ground with business partners. We both want to make the product successful. We both want to serve our customers better. We both want to eliminated or at least reduce the number of issues, so we can all have a good sleep at night.Once the common goals/vision is constructed, we can both work toward the same direction and we have some criteria to evaluate our decisions.

Understand and accept the difference

The first thing to work on is to understand the difference between IT and Business. What are other people would like to accomplish? What do they care and don’t care? How they approach this issue and how they think about this issue? IT people tend to think an issue mathematically and abstractly, while business people tend to think more practically in terms of business impacts.Embrace those differences, not reject them. Make good use of the differences to tackle the same issue from different angles. Learn to appreciate an different view.

One Team

The organization should be designed to reward the overall results and reward collaboration based on the shared goals.If everybody is put into one team, with clearly goal and clearly defined positions, people will play like one team.

Techniques

Think Win-Win

Encourage people to think Win-Win solution. Don’t stop at win-lose and lose-win solution. Relationship is as important as the end results.

Build up Trust/Respects

Trust is the magic that makes everything working seamlessly. There are many ways to build up trust between IT and Business, including face to face interaction, cross-training, experience each other’s job and encourage interactions outside working environment.

Communication channels

Make the communication channels smooth. Let the information flow freely between IT and business in an honest and open way.This can be achieved through periodical questionnaire for feedbacks, frequently meetings, share of the documents, inclusive email distribution, discussion forums, and the web 2.0 techniques like wiki and blogging.

After all, we need to treat our business partners truly as partners. Time should be spent to build on relationships, trust grown, appreciation expressed and happiness of success shared. If we do so, not only we will find our life as IT professionals easier and merrier, but also we will find more friends and less enemies in our life.

Most of the days, we wake up in the morning, brush our teeth, wash face, have a brief breakfast and rush out to work. But, there are some special mornings. When we open our eyes, we start to see the world differently. This morning is one of such for me.

Maybe I have stayed in the development department in a big organization for too long. I was so used to the layback, slow-moving, stable, orderly working style. So, when I had the opportunity to go through a demo session of a competitor’s application yesterday, I was completely shocked, not only by the application, but also by the attitude they treat their work.

We developed our application in a typical “elegant” way of big organization. And they developed their application like a “startup” company.The differences are in sharp contrast. I listed some here:

• We wait for the requirements being given to us by other departments like Sales or Marketing vs. They go out to talk to frontline Sale people and to customers directly, for example in the trade show, to figure out the requirements firsthand.
• We are proud of the technologies we used and focus on latest and advanced technologies vs. They are proud of the product itself and focus on how it can satisfy customer needs.
• We focus on internal architecture design and build for last vs. They focus user interfaces and usability and build to sell.
• We live with the legacy system and spend a lot of time integrating with it vs. They completely write all the logics in contemporary technologies.
• We value stability vs. They value innovation
• We limit our releases per year vs. They release much more frequently
• We only serve one customer, our business vs. They look for opportunities inside and outside the organization
• We have never been worried about “selling” our product. We assume the business would take care of it and Sales people will sell it vs. They constantly promot their idea and product to the business. They made the business realize how great their product was by doing the demo, comparing the features and showing the statistics numbers.

It’s a typical example of “fast vs. slow”. In current business environment, the one who can sense the changes ahead of others and quickly adjust itself for the changes will survive.We witness more and more triumphs of the “internal marketing” or “project marketing”. Although we ARE the internal development department, we have to realize the business has choices nowadays. We cannot assume that we are the sole service providers available to the business and they will eat whatever we feed them. Those old golden days for IT are gone!

Business is business. If you would like to survive, you have to go out there and compete. You must build the best product in the market, and constantly market your service to the business leaders. If you don’t do that, the competitors from any corner of the world can come and replace you. So, wake up you old development! Time to act like a young startup now!

Recently, the Quality of the IT services were frequently talked about. Users were yelling about how bad the services are. Crisis showed up everyday. People were running around with the same word in their mouth, “Quality”. A magic word. But how to get it? Let’s take a look at the ITIL way.

What’s Quality?

“Quality is the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfils requirements”  – From ISO 9000

“Service Quality is about ensuring customers get what they want” – From Managing Service Quality

We tend to think quality is just the number of defects and production issues. That’s a misleading thinking because it didn’t take in consideration the “customer” factor.

Actually, “Quality” is an interactive term. It’s all about satisfying and exceeding Customer Expectations. Customer is in the center of the Quality Universe.

Here are some common mistakes we made in the history:

• We deliver the highest quality software in the industry because we use the latest and coolest technologies!
• Customers don’t know what they want. We know better. We should make decision for them.
• They already gave us the functional specs. That’s all we need to deliver what they want.

In our past experience, those usually backfired immediately when the software was delivered to Production environment.

The coolest technology may not be the easiest to use and may cost too much to build or may not be stable enough. Our customer may not like the decision we made for them. They are the one using the software, not us. The old functional specs may go out of date immediately after they are written. What we delivered is not useful anymore.

Just imagine that we go to a restaurant, the waitress doesn’t even ask what we want and just throw us some dishes that uses the most costly and coolest materials, or some dishes she thinks we will like, or the same dishes we ordered two years ago. What will we think? Is she out of her mind?

We have been constantly doing that for years. When customer complained, we felt they were like idiots and were even more convinced they don’t know what a “high quality” product is.

If we seriously want to improve the quality of our services, we need to start with listening to our customer.

Manage Customer Expectations

Let’s put ourselves into our customer’s shoes. How do our customers evaluate the service quality? We can again recall our experience with our favorite restaurant and how we become the frequent visitors.

• When we first visit the restaurant, we found the food and all the services (parking, friendliness of the waiter, music, atmosphere, look and taste of the food, correct bill, etc.) all exceed our expectations. We were so satisfied and decided to come back.
• When we came back the second time, we got the same level of services. Everything was great. We fell into love and came back again and again.
• After we became frequent visitors, the price of the dishes didn’t go up for us. Instead, we even got frequent-dinner discounts. Well, the prices sometime went up because everything else went up, we understood.

That’s exactly what our customer expected from us:

• Can the service we provided satisfy their expectations?
• Can they get the same service time and time again?
• Is the service provided by a reasonable cost?

We can further translate those into IT terms.

For Software Development Services, they expect us:

• Deliver on schedule, as we promised
• Deliver all the functions specified in the requirements, correctly
• Deliver the project under the budget

However, we are not only delivering software to our customers. We are actually delivering “Business Application Services” to them. They not only expect the software works, but also they expect:

• The application is available at the time needed
• The performance of the application is good enough to support the business
• The application will act normally even at the busiest hours.
• The application can follow up with the growth of the business. No matter how fast we add clients, the application should act normally.
• In case of disaster, the application service will be resumed as soon as possible with no data lost
• When some issues happen, they will be addressed in a reasonable period of time with the satisfaction of the customer.
• The same issue won’t come again and again. That’s very annoying.
• The maintenance cost for the application is reasonable.

It’s very easy to simply ignore some or all of those non-functional aspects of the quality. We are happy and proud when we deliver all the functions on time with “no defect”. But very often the celebration party was interrupted with annoying issues falling into those categories like performance, availability and capacity. If we didn’t consider them in our design and implementation, we were doomed to have angry and unsatisfied customers, no matter how many new functions we put in and how hard we worked overtime to guarantee ontime delivery.

Measurements

If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it
If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it
If you cannot measure it, you probably don’t care about it
If you cannot influence it, you don’t need to measure it

We now know that Quality is all about Customer Expectations and we know that besides the correctness of the functionalities, the non-functional aspects are as important to customer satisfaction. But, how do we improve the customer satisfaction (a.k.a the Quality)? The first thing we desperately need is Metrics, the quantitative measurements.

Here is an example. Say, we decided to improve the Availability of one of our mission-critical application service. How do we know the current level of Availability, the ideal availability and if we are improving it or ruining it? Instead of relying on the “feeling” of our customer (or ourselves), we need some numbers on the paper to speak for itself. We either see the Availability number goes up or the Unavailability number goes down week after week, month after month before we (and our customers) can be sure “it’s improving“. But, what number?

We need a mathematic model to define Availability or Unavailability. Here is the one most commonly used by the industry.

We define the “System Incident Interval” as the time period between two consequent incidents that make the system unavailable. It can be further broken down into “Down time (fix time)” and “Normal Operation Time”.

We can define the following metrics to measure the system availability:

• MTTR (Mean Time to Repair): Average Down Time including Detect Time and Resolve Time.
• MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures): Average Normal Operation Time
• MTBSI (Mean Time Between System Incidents): Average time between two incidents
• Availability Ratio: MTBF/MTBSI*100%

If we keep tracking those metrics in a regular basis, we will have a much better understanding of issues that are affecting the availability of our application services.

We will know if the nature of our issues is small ones that happen frequently and can be fixed quickly or big one that rarely happens but once it happened, it takes a long time to fix. Based on that nature, we can implement different preventative strategies.

Best of all, having those numbers around help set the correct impression. It’s not about “feelings” anymore. We will have some common ground to stand while communicating to our customer and have something concrete to work on.

Consistency

An important factor to the Quality (remember, it’s all about customer impression) is consistency. If the service level varies significantly from time to time, it’s hard to construct trust and confidence in the customer.

For example, you went to the restaurant at Monday and you were served by Nicky. It was a beautiful experience and you totally enjoyed it. When you went back at Wednesday with higher expectation, unfortunately Nicky was on vacation. You were served by Bill. It was totally different and much worse experience. You left so angrily. Would you go back at Friday?

The same concept can be applied to IT services. Delivering the extremely high level service once, followed by several below-average service, will badly hurt your relationship with the customer. You can only earn the trust of your customer by constantly delivering high quality services.

Now, the question is how to maintain the consistency of your service level. How can you make the service level consistent even the service is delivered by totally different people, no matter it’s Nicky or Bill or Laura?

The key is process.

“A process is a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs: a structure for action. … Taking a process approach implies adopting the customer’s point of view. Processes are the structure by which an organization does what is necessary to produce value for its customers.”

- Thomas Davenport, “Process Innovation”

Only when the process is clearly defined and strictly followed, the consistent results can be expected. This is especially true for Services because Services are the one time interaction with the customer. In most of the time, we don’t have the time and opportunity to rollback or redo the Service.

By following a predefined and well-tuned process, the “human” factor can be greatly reduced. Both the customer and us, the service provider, will have more confidence in the quality.

Just by clearly defining and documenting the process, we open the door to improve the process and the quality of the outcome. Without a defined process, it’s hard to even repeat the service delivered last time, not to mention improving it.

Having said that, we shouldn’t underestimate the influence of “human” factors. After all, any good process has to be carried out by human. Familiarities, morale and skill level will make big difference.

Conclusion

Quality is all about customer expectations. We must consistently delivery high quality services that exceed customer expectations. To do that, we need to quantitatively measure the key criteria of the service, taking into consideration of non-functional criteria, and implement the right process to guarantee the consistency.

The original article was published in Chinese on “IT Times”, a famous magazine in IT field in China. I think there are a lot of merits in it and translated the key points into English.

Reason 1: “Only focus on the market of white collar middle class people and ignore the majority of regular people” v.s “Treat the white collar market and the market of regular people equally. ”

Ignoring the majority and only focusing on the high level, white collar class are the key reason of failure of the American Internet websites. But, they will never realize that.

No one in the American Internet Giants will understand it because the employees of those American companies are most from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore or have oversea education background. They are all white collar class staying only in the modern business buildings. All they know about China are within those modern buildings. Their product design, website style and promotion targets are only for the white collar class who stay in the same modern buildings as them. They only target the Fortune 500 companies and never care about what the majority of people want and the needs for middle or small sized companies in China.

The education background, interests and vision of the designers of American websites turned them against of the regular, average majority. They think the kids playing in the Internet Café and the people get online from thousands small towns in China are inferior, even those two kinds of users adding together exceed half of the Chinese Internet users. They dislike the tastes of those “regular” people, e.g. the “Super Girl” show.

They only know Gmail, never use 163 mailbox. They only use MSN, not QQ, because they would like to demonstrate how elegant they are. They would rather see their websites closed, than see a website without taste and only satisfy the needs of the regular people.

They are doomed to fail if they don’t want to satisfy the regular people.

Reason 2: “You can hate me, but don’t forget me” v.s. “You can forget me, but don’t hate me”

American websites are afraid of negative news. Chinese websites are afraid of no negative news. Chinese website would like to be “hated” by thousands of people because that’s the way they will be remembered by the market. That’s the way they get their traffic.

The salaries of the employees in American Internet companies are 10 times of their competitors in Chinese internet companies. They are so afraid of losing their jobs. Their philosophy is no mistake first, getting the results second. They never want to take any risk. That’s the reason they are beaten by their Chinese competitor badly.

Reason 3: “Think in long term” v.s. “Think in short term”

American websites always have a long term plan. They spent huge money doing all kinds of useless marketing researches on paper. They are planning for years. They have strategies and budgets. The worst thing is it’s not easy to change those plans. It may take more than a month to get an extra garbage bin from the American headquarters if it’s out of the budget. If every change has to be approved by the headquarters, the American websites are doomed to fail in China.
Chinese websites are consistently thinking in short term objectives. The time to market is the most important. They made mistakes and quickly corrected them along the road.

Reason 4: “Goal is not everything. The method matters” v.s “Goal is everything. We don’t care how to get it.”

Chinese websites set a single performance indicator every year and fight to get it. As long as the ways don’t break the law, they will use them.

American websites have many indicators and many rules. They care about the professional ethics and the brand image the most. After that, they have dozens of long term and short term business objectives and performance indicators.

Reason 5: “Act as the savor of the users” v.s. “Follow users’ needs”

One good thing of the International Websites is they really care about user experiences. However, sometimes, they think too much for the users. Chinese users need more options. They don’t need you to choose for them.

For example, American cares a lot about their privacy. But Chinese don’t care too much about it. The American messaging software giant, ICQ, did a lot to protect the privacy of the users and make the software hard to use in internet cafes. Their Chinese competitor QQ beated it out of the Chinese market by simply getting rid of some of the restrictions of ICQ to satisfy the needs of the Chinese internet users in the small internet cafes.

Reason 6: “Passive gentleman-style advertisement” v.s. “Active, even forceful, sales”

The advertisements of international Internet websites are focus on their brand names. It’s hard to attract the traffic. Chinese websites put out not only brand advertisements, but also lively events to attract eye-balls. They get the real revenues as well as brand acknowledges.

For example, take a look at the ads for eBay and TaoBao. They all listed their products in banner format. However, eBay put up products like iPod or Zippo. Many Chinese customers cannot read English and don’t know what those products are. TaoBao put up some attractive products like sexy underwear to attract the eye-balls. The results achieved by TaoBao are 10 times more than eBay.

Maybe the international internet websites know about the trick. However, their elegant attitude prevents them from doing it.

Reason 7: “Excellent quality but no user” v.s. “Bad quality but plenty of users”

The market promotion ways of international websites are unbelievably similar. First, they have the 4A advertise company design a set of graceful flat advertisements. Then, they put them in subway or bus stations. They will design another set of web ads designed for the taste of narrow market of white collar middle class, and put them to the biggest 3 portal website in China. They spend a lot of money buying key words from Google, but never buy from Baidu.

The ads for the international websites are beautiful and applauded by many experts. But they cannot attract traffic to their websites.

Chinese websites always focus on traffic. If I pay one cent in advertisement, I need to attract one more people to my website, no matter who he is. The traffic is real.

Reason 8: “Communicate through email and MSN” v.s. “Phone call and face-to-face communication”

Employees of the international internet companies spend 90% communicate through emails with their colleagues and clients. They are proud of their grammar-perfect English. Sometimes, it needs 10 emails to resolve one small thing that can be done through one phone call.

When Hongwei Zhou took over Yahoo China, he had to fire those employees who only communicated through email to get the business back on track.

The employees of the international internet companies used English as their working language. This greatly impacted their efficiency. They never knew they are doing business in China and should use Chinese language and the Chinese ways of communications.

Reason 9: “Beautiful and clean” v.s. “Crowded and exciting”

American websites are always beautiful, concise, clean and elegant. Good things always hide deeply inside the website. 20% of the white collar middle class users like it but the rest 80% majority feel cold and leave right way.

Their competing websites are lively crowded, bustling with noise and excitement. All the good stuffs, the links and the floating banners are in the front page. The main purpose is to show them to the user right away. The beauty and art design are not the main focus.

The designers in Yahoo China still look down upon the website hao123. It’s a crowded and ugly website. However, hao123 attracted much more traffic than Yahoo China with much less cost.

Reason 10: “Only recruit the people who have the similar background and from management point of view” v.s. “Recruit variety of people who have entrepreneur spirit”

The recruiting process of the international internet companies emphasized the similar ways of communication and the agreed upon untold rules. The preferred employees were people from Hong Kong and TaiWan or people who had oversea educational background. They were all similar. Outsiders cannot enter their circle. From management point of view, they were stable, consistent and easy to manage. No wonder those failure strategies passed without any arguments.

Their competing Chinese websites recruited decision makers, adventurers, entrepreneurs, as well as the hard workers. Although they varied a lot, they all had an aggressive nature and can build websites which beated American websites.

If the international internet websites don’t change their behaviors in those 10 areas, their business won’t take off in China.

I have to say there are a lot of good insights in this article. But I don’t agree with all the points made by the author, especially about achieving the goal by all means. Both the goal and the means matters. Without appropriate means, the golen goal turns into dust. The current success of the Chinese websites are not indicators for the success in the long run. Achieving the short-term goal may damage the opportunities for future growth. To become a lasting business as those international websites, those Chinese websites also have some lessons to learn from those giant competitors.

ITIL(Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is the international standard for IT Service Management.  

ITIL Introduction is a presentation I prepared for the managers of my department after I passed the test for ITIL Foundation Certification. I didn’t cover the details of ITIL. In stead, I would like to point out the concepts, like Service, Quality, Measurement, etc., that are deeply rooted in ITIL materials and things that really impressed me and changed my minds.

It was presented in front of a group of mid-level managers. It generated some interests in ITIL, especially the idea of “measurement”. However, since the presentation was too high level and conceptual, it didn’t eventually take off the wide-spread ITIL implementation in my organization.

The lesson learned, you have to follow through your initiative rentlessly!