Adapting to Become a Customer-Focused IT Organisation

The pressure for IT organisations to be customer-focused is rising. It originates with your customers and the power they now yield, and is gradually penetrating through the layers of the organisation, from the obvious customer-facing departments deeper into the operations and capabilities that underpin your organisation's success. Despite this pressure, IT organisations are finding it challenging to adapt to this new mindset and way of working.

There is evidence of how customer focus can be embedded within IT organisations, and the solutions can be applied at micro and macro levels. The outcomes are clear:

• Clarity on how well current business as usual services are meeting internal customer needs and expectations
• Opportunities for refining organisational models to align to internal customer segments
• Identification of areas for possible automation and cost reduction
• A continuous improvement capability that, once set up, is self-sustaining, shifting behaviours, mindsets and culture to become customer-centred
• Improved relations between technology and the business

A customer-focused IT organisation will have a knock-on effect, delivering value more effectively and efficiently to its internal business customers, which then drives improved value delivery to the paying customers at the end of the value stream. This in turn contributes to the customer's experience and impacts key measures such as satisfaction and loyalty.

The Rising Pressure to Focus on Customers

The pressure comes from a variety of sources:

• Customers hold most of the power these days and can churn if they do not receive the value they expect in the way they want it.
• The business units IT serves, who are closer in the value stream to the paying customers, are adapting to this pressure by embedding more customer-focused paradigms, such as being product-led, human-centred or design-led. That changes how they work with you.
• IT standards such as ITIL 4 are incorporating many of the methods from long established design disciplines such as user experience, user research and service design, recognising the importance of customers in co-creating value.
• The narrative across senior leadership, from the board and in digital and technology, is changing, with declarations about the importance of customer focus, often followed by explicit principles and objectives that must then cascade down into the organisation.
• Your employees are also consumers, and expect their employee experience, and the internal services that underpin it, to reflect the consumer quality they receive outside of work.

Yet despite this pressure, it appears most IT organisations are not making the shift. Why is that?

Why Customer-Focused Change Is Not Happening

In established IT organisations, with tens, hundreds or even thousands of existing IT services running business as usual, the following problems stand in the way:

• Customer focus has rarely been a priority for IT leaders, or in the measures of success for IT organisations, and traditionally customer is not a language IT speaks.
• Everyone is so busy delivering business as usual services that there is no time to lift heads up and think and act for the internal customers.
• IT professionals have a reasonable conceptual understanding of what being customer-centred means, but they are not able to describe it in terms of their own IT services.
• There is a desire to be customer-focused but a lack of understanding of how to be.

That last point is evidenced by the absence of key customer-centred artefacts and activities:

• A clear definition of the customer segments consuming the IT service, and any archetypes of them
• A blueprint showing how the service is delivered, and the interdependent parts that come together to deliver value through interactions with customers
• Customer measures defined and being collected
• Customer feedback mechanisms in place. Where they exist they are often manual, sporadic, and rarely represent the end-to-end customer lifecycle
• Continuous improvement actions derived from customer insight and analysis
• Investment decisions and strategic plans explicitly considering customer needs and expectations
• Customers being engaged in the design and optimisation of services

All of this can be overcome, and the will to do so, at least at ground level, is there. But how?

Four Steps to Embedding Customer Focus

1. Identify the key internal customer segments IT serves, and the major propositions being consumed by them, and how.
2. Conduct a customer maturity assessment of these key services, to understand the extent to which the customer is currently integrated into the development and operation of the services.
3. Use the output of the assessment to drive activities that increase maturity. This will often include helping service owners understand who their direct customers are, how their service is currently delivered, and applying customer insight to measure current performance and drive improvement initiatives. These activities can be done at scale or at team level using standardised workshop templates and artefacts.
4. Embed a customer-centred operation within IT services as part of business as usual. This looks different for each organisation, but primarily focuses on making customer-related activities part of continuous improvement, including using your ITSM platform as a mechanism for capturing customer-related artefacts and measuring maturity over time.

Your Next Step Starts Here

To recap, there is a sense of inevitability that customer focus will impact IT organisations and their leadership as pressure gradually penetrates the layers of the organisation. There are clear reasons why customer-focused change is not happening. However, it can be done, using a tried and tested maturity model, playbook and associated tools.

Ask yourself the following:

1. Are you seeing some of the signs that customer focus is something that will impact your IT organisation?
2. Do you know whether your IT service owners and their teams have created the key customer-centred artefacts and conducted the activities listed above?
3. If you do not do anything about this, where does it lead for your IT organisation?