At the New Year, some people struggle to identify a bad habit that they want to end. Their co-workers, of course, instantly produce a long list of irritating behaviors. Similarly, every IT team’s business partners have a 2015 New Year’s Resolution for them – “Stop Being Dr. No.”
Lines of business complain that when they ask their IT for anything new, the answer is always “No.” Sometimes the rejection is instantaneous, with laments about reduced budgets, complex regulations, and distributed operations. Other times the refusal takes the form of “we’ll look at it,” and nothing ever happens. Lines of business don’t aspire to set up rogue IT environments; they feel like they have no alternatives.
Fortunately, IT can curb its “No” habit with two steps: 1) Listen and 2) embrace all the tools in the toolkit.
First, IT needs to adopt the hottest new technology on the market – listening to its customers. Listening is difficult. While another person is talking, most of us think about what we’re going to say next, amusing personal criticisms or something else entirely. After the exchange, we tend to complain about the other person’s inability to understand our challenges, which makes them totally unreasonable. Finally, we look for any reason to dismiss their requests.
Continue reading the post on our sister site Reflections.
