Purpose:

Manage the relationship between the business and IT in a formalized and transparent way that ensures a focus on achieving a common and shared goal of successful enterprise outcomes in support of strategic goals and within the constraint of budgets and risk tolerance. Base the relationship on mutual trust, using open and understandable terms and common language and a willingness to take ownership and accountability for key decisions.

Objective:

Create improved outcomes, increased confidence, trust in IT and effective use of resources.

Description:

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Inputs:

  • Strategic Road Map
  • Identified gaps in IT services to the business
  • Improvement action plans and remediation
  • Service level performance reports
  • Root causes of quality delivery failures
  • Classified and prioritized incidents and service requests
  • User confirmation of satisfactory fulfillment or resolution
  • Closed service requests and incidents
  • Request fulfillment status and trends report
  • Incident status and trends report
  • SLAs
  • Risk impact communication
  • Operation and use plan
  • Supplemental support plan
  • Communications of planned maintenance downtime
  • Communication of knowledge learned
  • Service catalogues
  • Review results of quality of service, including customer feedback
  • Customer requirements for quality management
  • Results of quality reviews and audits
  • Results of solution and service delivery quality monitoring
  • Maintenance plan
  • Success measures and results
  • Supplemental support plan

Outputs:

  • Clarified and agreed-on business expectations
  • Agreed-on next steps and action plans
  • Agreed-on key decisions Internal
  • Complaint and escalation status Internal
  • Communication plan Internal
  • Communication packages Internal
  • Customer responses Internal
  • Satisfaction analyses
  • Definition of potential improvement projects

Controls:

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Task Instructions:

Understand Business Expectations

    1. Identify business stakeholders, their interests, and their areas of responsibilities.
    2. Review current enterprise direction, issues, strategic objectives, and alignment with enterprise architecture.
    3. Maintain an awareness of business processes and associated activities and understand demand patterns that relate to service volumes and use.
    4. Clarify business expectations for IT-enabled services and solutions and ensure that requirements are defined with associated business acceptance criteria and metrics.
    5. Confirm agreement of business expectations, acceptance criteria, and metrics to relevant parts of IT by all stakeholders.
    6. Manage expectations by ensuring that business units understand priorities, dependencies, financial constraints, and the need to schedule requests.
    7. Understand the current business environment, process constraints or issues, geographical expansion or contraction, and industry/regulatory drivers

Identify Opportunities, Risk and Constraints for IT to enhance the Business

    1. Understand technology trends and new technologies and how these can be applied innovatively to enhance business process performance.
    2. Play a proactive role in identifying and communicating with key stakeholders on opportunities, risks, and constraints. This includes current and emerging technologies, services, and business process models.
    3. Collaborate in agreeing on the next steps for major new initiatives in co-operation with portfolio management, including business case development.
    4. Ensure that the business and IT understand and appreciate the strategic objectives and enterprise architecture vision.
    5. Co-ordinate when planning new IT initiatives to ensure integration and alignment with the enterprise architecture.

Manage the Business Relationship

    1. Assign a relationship manager as a single point of contact for each significant business unit. Ensure that a single counterpart is identified in the business organization, and the counterpart has business understanding, sufficient technology awareness, and the appropriate level of authority.
    2. Manage the relationship in a formalized and transparent way that ensures a focus on achieving a common and shared goal of successful enterprise outcomes in support of strategic goals and within the constraint of budgets and risk tolerance.
    3. Define and communicate complaints and escalation procedures to resolve any relationship issues.
    4. Plan specific interactions and schedules based on mutually agreed-on objectives and common language (service and performance review meetings, review of new strategies or plans, etc.).
    5. Ensure that key decisions are agreed on and approved by relevant accountable stakeholders.

Co-ordinate and Communicate

    1. Co-ordinate and communicate changes and transition activities such as project or change plans, schedules, release policies, release known errors, and training awareness.
    2. Co-ordinate and communicate operational activities, roles, and responsibilities, including the definition of request types, hierarchical escalation, major outages (planned and unplanned), and contents and frequency of service reports.
    3. Take ownership of the response to the business for major events that may influence the relationship with the business. Provide direct support if required.
    4. Maintain an end-to-end communication plan that defines the content, frequency, and recipients of service delivery information, including the status of value, delivered and any risk identified.

Provide Input to the Continual Improvement of Services

    1. Perform customer and provider satisfaction analysis. Ensure that issues are actioned and report results and status.
    2. Work together to identify, communicate, and implement improvement initiatives.
    3. Work with service management and process owners to ensure that IT-enabled services and service management processes are continually improved, and the root causes of any issues are identified and resolved.