Coordinating Between Roles and Responsibilities

Obviously, these five roles and responsibilities impact a broad range of people (from the executive suite on down to technical developers) and tasks (from overall corporate strategy to detailed design decisions and technology implementation). Coordinating between these people and tasks so that the whole train stays on the tracks is one of the major challenges that every organization faces when working with BTM. In order to put BTM's principles, activities, and governance to work, companies need a formalized management infrastructure to facilitate this coordination between each of the roles and responsibilities.

In the past, some argued for software solutions like groupware or corporate portals to play this role, others claimed that all companies needed was a good spate of team-building exercises to develop the lacking connections, while still others praised balanced scorecards. These are, respectfully, useful communication mediums, HR techniques, and performance measurement tactics, but they aren't specifically designed for the range of interactions between the CxO suite, the office of the CIO, the PMO, business professionals, and technology professionals that are necessary to help BTM make the jump from promise to practice. Although companies appear to recognize that there needs to be some middleman between each of these players, British American Tobacco's Kevin Poulter observes that most companies still don't have an infrastructure dedicated to that goal in the same way that they have infrastructures for other parts of the business.

One of the things of which I am a strong proponent is that we approach IT as a significant function in the organization that needs an infrastructure to automate interactions and decisions just the same way as operations or marketing. All of those functions have their own systems to support their operations. For example, in our business, the marketing function is responsible for managing a portfolio of brands and operations is responsible for managing a portfolio of manufacturing capabilities. Similarly, IT is responsible for managing a portfolio of applications and increasingly so, business services. In a lot of major organizations, operations and the marketing portfolios are supported quite well by information technology. But finding organizations that actually support their IT management function using IT is somewhat less common. You could almost say that the corporate IT department suffers from the "cobbler's children have no shoes" syndrome.

Although the overall effort to get BTM to work in the enterprise is shared between the five general roles, the primary responsibility and accountability for putting an infrastructure in place to facilitate this communication and collaboration resides with the office of the CIO. Today, most CIOs lack a management infrastructure that is analogous to those that are commonly available to their business counterparts ”CFOs and financial planners have financial modeling and analysis tools, sales and marketing executives rely on sales force automation (SFA) and CRM infrastructures, and manufacturing professionals have SCM at their disposal. These other functions are made more efficient and productive by supporting management infrastructures ”after all, I wouldn't refute that just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing is made more feasible because of SCM technologies ”so it's logical to demand that IT be supported in equal fashion.