Building Alliances Across Divisions


Mon, January 08, 2007

CIO

By Maya Townsend

Several weeks ago, a distraught vice president called. His organization had just been restructured. He needed to integrate his new divisions quickly and help them collaborate with his existing organization. The problem: He had inherited a group of people who didn’t understand why the change had happened and were struggling with why they should redesign their processes to accommodate the new organization chart. In addition, they were used to working alone and saw no reason to collaborate with their new peers. The VP had to help them find the way while continuing to raise the performance bar.

This situation is not unusual. Technology executives live in a world of change where the only constants seem to be the need to boost performance, increase productivity and collaborate with others. In this highly matrixed, integrated, driven, global environment, there are too few people and too much work for us to section ourselves off from others. We rely on our colleagues to share knowledge, solve problems jointly, provide data and information and support our work. In return, we do the same. Yet, collaboration is easier than it sounds. Successful collaboration takes time and focused effort. But where to start? Here are some tips on how to build effective alliances across divisions.

Start with the Why People have a lot to do. If they don’t truly understand the importance of collaboration, they won’t do it. For example, someone might agree with a vague rationale for collaboration, such as, “It will improve our customer service.” But that doesn’t give a person the motivation to insist on collaboration and work across boundaries when deadlines loom and the pressure is high. Why take time for some fuzzy concept that may or not be achieved?

A much more compelling rationale is: “The X Department works with our customers every day. If we don’t develop close relationships with the department, we’ll never know enough to please our customers.” This rationale lays it all out on the table: what the partner has that is critical, why it is needed, and what consequences come from failing to collaborate.

Coming up with this kind of business rationale for collaboration is the first step in building a successful relationship across divisions. To clarify the business rationale, answer these questions:

  • What is at stake for the company and customers if divisions don’t collaborate effectively?
  • What does each group have that the other group needs?
  • Why are others counting on these groups to perform?
  • What could happen if both parties don’t collaborate effectively?
Build Individual Relationships to Build Group Relationships

Continue Reading

As you know, everything is mobile, connected, interactive, and immediate. This is exactly why organizations need a highly agile IT infrastructure in order to keep pace with extreme fluctuations in business demand. This book will help you understand why infrastructure convergence has been widely accepted as the optimal approach for simplifying and accelerating your IT to deliver services at the speed of business while also shifting significantly more IT resources from operations to innovation.
For this white paper, IDC performed an in-depth analysis of the business value of VMware View, defined as the expected ROI associated with the use of the solution as a platform for the targeted deployment of a virtual desktop infrastructure.
This paper explains virtualization, its benefits for mid-sized business and how IBM's virtualization strategy can help these companies reduce costs, improve services and simplify management.
Forrester Research makes recommendations on best practices to optimize branch virtualization and consolidation initiatives. See how a "thin" branch architecture, with key servers, services and applications in the data center that relies on a high-performing WAN connection, can offer the greatest efficiencies.
When trying to achieve continuous compliance with internal policies and external regulations, organizations need to replace traditional processes with a new best practice approach and new innovative technology, such as that provided by IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager.
IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager helps organizations automatically manage patches for multiple operating systems and applications across hundreds of thousands of endpoints regardless of location, connection type or status.  
Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as support considerations
Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business
Applications are changing - they're increasingly web-oriented, global in nature and run from multiple device types. Additionally, the volume of data is growing exponentially every year. How do you ensure your applications have fast, accurate, up-to-date information in this new world? Modern applications are data-intensive; delivering data the old way using monolithic databases isn't working. What's needed is a modern approach to data. One that scales-out as needed and delivers predictable high performance, but without sacrificing data consistency or integrity.
VMware View™ 5 simplifies IT management while increasing end user freedom by delivering desktop services from your cloud. Building upon VMware's leadership in desktop virtualization, VMware View 5 delivers a high-performance user experience while giving IT greater policy control.

View this webcast and find out how VMware View 5 can help you:
- Deliver the highest fidelity experience of desktop services across any device and any network
- Simplify and automate IT management, security and control of desktop services
- Reduce the costs associated with your desktop environment
IT professionals are being asked to deliver faster "time-to-value" than ever before. An IDG Research survey found that CIOs are eager to invest in technologies that will enable them to get new applications and services up quickly, achieving faster time-to-value.
Learn how to reduce IT management overhead, ease revision control, guarantee data security, scale systems more quickly and reduce server and software costs.
Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter
  1. View all Newsletters | Privacy Policy
Resource Center