When Ames Flynn, vice president and CIO of Thomasville Furniture Industries in Thomasville, N.C., wants to know what’s happening in the company trenches, he turns to his application managers. He has charged these five key staff members to do more than provide technical assistance for the manufacturing, sales and distribution functions. They’re also experts on user needs, providing Flynn with early warning of problems and emerging needs. Last summer, for example, the company decided to shift some of its furniture manufacturing operations from Mexico to China. The information technology manager in charge of sales, distribution and furniture manufacturing applications, who reports to Flynn, alerted him that some other project should be put on the back burner to accommodate the new work.

At many companies, IT staff serving as liaisons to business units help CIOs identify common needs across the company, investigate user complaints and help users identify functional requirements for new projects. In "The State of the CIO 2003" survey, 55 percent of best practices CIOs rated this method as highly effective. Top CIOs say there are three keys to using liaisons.

Use Business Experts

Flynn’s application managers all have work experience in the functional areas they support. The manager for manufacturing and administrative systems worked for years in accounting and in Thomasville’s manufacturing plants. The e-business manager has a marketing background. To ensure the managers keep up with what’s happening in the field, Flynn asks them to spend four to five days a year on the front lines, working in the factories or offices where their systems are being used.

Cranmer of the Mayo Clinic subscribes to the same philosophy. For his customer relationship managers, he taps only analysts or IT project managers who are former nurses and lab technicians. Cranmer describes how a critical care nurse he recruited to be his liaison to the clinic’s intensive care unit made a crucial contribution to managing user expectations for a new patient-monitoring system. Nurses and physicians had asked for a system that recorded patients’ vital signs every second?a requirement that would have generated massive amounts of data and slowed its delivery. The former nurse knew no one would ever be able to use that much information. "He had the ability to say, If I was here on my own, I wouldn’t be here handwriting measurements every second," says Cranmer. Users wanted more frequent monitoring than they could accomplish manually, but recording data once a minute?or every five minutes?could satisfy that requirement in a way that made more sense technically.