CIO’s can learn customer service lessons from the local car dealership

Have you spent any time at the service department of your local car dealership? I’ve brought my car and SUV to two different dealerships and the experience was pretty much the same – quality service; done right and on-time.

CIO’s can learn a lot about how automobile dealerships are organized to deliver quality service, thereby earning a profit. For government CIO’s earning a profit is not a consideration, but delivering IT solutions whereby the customer’s definition of quality is of paramount importance.

The Service Department Manager is ultimately responsible for the delivery of services, customer satisfaction and profit. The service department is organized into several “teams”. In some dealerships trucks may be assigned to the Red Team, SUVs and mini-vans are assigned to the Blue Team and standard sedans assigned to the Green Team.

Each team lead (a.k.a. service advisor) is responsible for meeting with the customer, gathering “requirements”, and communicating costs, a timetable, and overall expectations. The team lead then works with the mechanics to ensure that they have the resources necessary to complete the job.

There is an important lesson here. It is insufficient to the bottom-line to just have quality people in your organization. The way in which people are organized and structured is critically important to achieving successful outcomes.

The knock against Government IT organizations

The narrative that government CIOs may hear from their peers and agency heads is this:

1. Customers feel you are not engaged or understand their priorities;
2. It takes far too long to deploy applications and services;
3. It costs too much money to deploy technology.

In my view, CIO’s should have a laser focus on three areas: customer engagement, time to deliver, and cost effectiveness.

In large Information Technology (IT) shops – particularly within the government; the CIO has not aligned the internal organization in a way that focuses on the three challenges listed above. Often the organization is structured in such as way that there are too many touch points between the various IT divisions.

For example, there may be an account management team, a network infrastructure team, a platform infrastructure team, an IT security team, an applications development team, a testing team… on and on it can go. The level of coordination and cooperation that is necessary to make this work is dauntingly complex – and largely unnecessary.

Align Apps Dev along technology platforms

CIOs should create application teams whereby the team lead is entirely responsible for meeting with customers, gathering functional requirements, building and deploying the solution. This can be accomplished by creating teams that are aligned by technology platforms.

For example, create a team that handles the Sun Solaris, and Oracle environment. Create a team to manage the Microsoft .NET environment, a team to handle Microsoft SharePoint services, and a team to handle the open source (LAMP) environment.  By creating these semi autonomous teams, they have control over the entire process – from client communications, requirements to development and delivery.

This structure eliminates the “seams” between organizational groups because specialists are matrixed into the team.  The IT security specialists reports and ultimately receives his yearly evaluation from the team lead.

“Free Market” competition for client funding

The other advantage to this approach is that it creates a healthy competition between the teams. Competition is the key driver to overcoming the three principle challenges to the CIO (customer engagement, time to deliver and cost effectiveness). If the Sun/Oracle team would take too long and be too costly to deliver the app, the customer could go to the Microsoft .NET team instead.

This healthy internal marketplace would ultimately lead to technology stacks becoming too costly and too inefficient to operate compared to other technologies. Perhaps over time, if it became apparent that the Sun/Oracle platform is not cost competitive, the CIO would put the platform into O&M mode.

New application teams could be stood up to follow best practices in the private sector. In addition to the technologies mentioned above, a team could be created to handle applications using commercial cloud computing services such as Google’s App Engine or Amazon’s EC2. As one technology stack became “uncompetitive” other application platforms (and their teams) would be stood-up.

Ultimately, if CIOs are to meet the challenge of customer engagement, rapid deployment, and low costs; CIOs should strongly consider an organizational structure that included decentralized, empowered teams focused on delivering applications and IT services.

Tagged as: apps dev, Government, IT Strategy