Establish Data Governance

Deliver measurable business value.

Analyst Perspective

Establish a data governance program that brings value to your organisation.

Data governance does not sit as an island on its own in the organisation – it must align with and be driven by your enterprise governance. As you build out data governance in your organisation, it's important to keep in mind that this program is meant to be an enabling framework of oversight and accountabilities for managing, handling, and protecting your company's data assets. It should never be perceived as bureaucratic or inhibiting to your data users. It should deliver agreed-upon models that are conducive to your organisation's operating culture, offering clarity on who can do what with the data and via what means. Data governance is the key enabler for bringing high-quality, trusted, secure, and discoverable data to the right users across your organisation. Promote and drive the responsible and ethical use of data while helping to build and foster an organisational culture of data excellence.

Crystal Singh

Director, Research & Advisory, Data & Analytics Practice

Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

The amount of data within organisations is growing at an exponential rate, creating a need to adopt a formal approach to governing data. However, many organisations remain uninformed on how to effectively govern their data. Comprehensive data governance should define leadership, accountability, and responsibility related to data use and handling and be supported by a well-oiled operating model and relevant policies and procedures. This will help ensure the right data gets to the right people at the right time, using the right mechanisms.

Common Obstacles

Organisations are faced with challenges associated with changing data landscapes, evolving business models, industry disruptions, regulatory and compliance obligations, and changing and maturing user landscape and demand for data. Although the need for a data governance program is often evident, organisations miss the mark when their data governance efforts are not directly aligned to delivering measurable business value. Initiatives should support key strategic initiatives, as well as value streams and their underlying business capabilities.

Info-Tech's Approach

Info-Tech's approach to establishing and sustaining effective data governance is anchored in the strong alignment of organisational value streams and their business capabilities with key data governance dimensions and initiatives. Organisations should:

• Align their data governance with enterprise governance, business strategy and value streams to ensure the program delivers measurable business value.
• Understand their current data governance capabilities so as to build out a future state that is right-sized and relevant.
• Define data leadership, accountability, and responsibility. Support these with an operating model that effectively manages change and communication and fosters a culture of data excellence.

Info-Tech Insight

Your organisation's value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face elevated operating costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and increased business risk.

Your challenge

This research is designed to help organisations build and sustain an effective data governance program.

• Your organisation has recognised the need to treat data as a corporate asset for generating business value and/or managing and mitigating risk.
• This has brought data governance to the forefront and highlighted the need to build a performance-driven enterprise program for delivering quality, trusted, and readily consumable data to users.
• An effective data governance program is one that defines leadership, accountability. and responsibility related to data use and handling. It's supported by a well-oiled operating model and relevant policies and procedures, all of which help build and foster a culture of data excellence where the right users get access to the right data at the right time via the right mechanisms.

As you embark on establishing data governance in your organisation, it's vital to ensure from the get-go that you define the drivers and business context for the program. Data governance should never be attempted without direction on how the program will yield measurable business value.

'Data processing and cleanup can consume more than half of an analytics team's time, including that of highly paid data scientists, which limits scalability and frustrates employees.' – Petzold, et al., 2020

'The productivity of employees across the organisation can suffer.' – Petzold, et al., 2020

Respondents to McKinsey's 2019 Global Data Transformation Survey reported that an average of 30% of their total enterprise time was spent on non-value-added tasks because of poor data quality and availability. – Petzold, et al., 2020

Common obstacles

Some of the barriers that make data governance difficult to address for many organisations include:

• Gaps in communicating the strategic value of data and data governance to the organisation. This is vital for securing senior leadership buy-in and support, which, in turn, is crucial for sustained success of the data governance program.
• Misinterpretation or a lack of understanding about data governance, including what it means for the organisation and the individual data user.
• A perception that data governance is inhibiting or an added layer of bureaucracy or complication rather than an enabling and empowering framework for stakeholders in their use and handling of data.
• Embarking on data governance without firmly substantiating and understanding the organisational drivers for doing so. How is data governance going to support the organisation's value streams and their various business capabilities?
• Neglecting to define and measure success and performance. Just as in any other enterprise initiative, you have to be able to demonstrate an ROI for time, resources and funding. These metrics must demonstrate the measurable business value that data governance brings to the organisation.
• Failure to align data governance with enterprise governance.

78% of companies (and 92% of top-tier companies) have a corporate initiative to become more data-driven. – Alation, 2020.

But despite these ambitions, there appears to be a 'data culture disconnect' – 58% of leaders overestimate the current data culture of their enterprises, giving a grade higher than the one produced by the study. – Fregoni, 2020.

The strategic value of data

Power intelligent and transformative organisational performance through leveraging data.

Respond to industry disruptors

Optimise the way you serve your stakeholders and customers

Develop products and services to meet ever-evolving needs

Manage operations and mitigate risk

Harness the value of your data

The journey to being data-driven

The journey to declaring that you are a data-driven organisation requires a pit stop at data enablement.

The Data Economy

Data Disengaged

You have a low appetite for data and rarely use data for decision making.

Data Enabled

Technology, data architecture, and people and processes are optimised and supported by data governance.

Data Driven

You are differentiating and competing on data and analytics; described as a 'data first' organisation. You're collaborating through data. Data is an asset.

Data governance is essential for any organisation that makes decisions about how it uses its data.

Data governance is an enabling framework of decision rights, responsibilities, and accountabilities for data assets across the enterprise.

Data governance is:

• Executed according to agreed-upon models that describe who can take what actions with what information, when, and using what methods (Olavsrud, 2021).
• True business-IT collaboration that will lead to increased consistency and confidence in data to support decision making. This, in turn, helps fuel innovation and growth.

If done correctly, data governance is not:

• An annoying, finger-waving roadblock in the way of getting things done.
• Meant to solve all data-related business or IT problems in an organisation.
• An inhibitor or impediment to using and sharing data.

Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework

Create impactful data governance by embedding it within enterprise governance

Organisational drivers for data governance

Data governance personas:

Conformance: Establishing data governance to meet regulations and compliance requirements.

Performance: Establishing data governance to fuel data-driven decision making for driving business value and managing and mitigating business risk.

Data Governance is not a one-person show

• Data governance needs a leader and a home. Define who is going to be leading, driving, and steering data governance in your organisation.
• Senior executive leaders play a crucial role in championing and bringing visibility to the value of data and data governance. This is vital for building and fostering a culture of data excellence.
• Effective data governance comes with business and IT alignment, collaboration, and formally defined roles around data leadership, ownership, and stewardship.

Traditional data governance organisational structure

A traditional structure includes committees and roles that span across strategic, tactical, and operational duties. There is no one-size-fits-all data governance structure. However, most organisations follow a similar pattern when establishing committees, councils, and cross-functional groups. Most organisations strive to identify roles and responsibilities at a strategic and operational level. Several factors will influence the structure of the program, such as the focus of the data governance project and the maturity and size of the organisation.

A healthy data culture is key to amplifying the power of your data.

'Albert Einstein is said to have remarked, "The world cannot be changed without changing our thinking." What is clear is that the greatest barrier to data success today is business culture, not lagging technology.' – Randy Bean, 2020

What does it look like?

• Everybody knows the data.
• Everybody trusts the data.
• Everybody talks about the data.

'It is not enough for companies to embrace modern data architectures, agile methodologies, and integrated business-data teams, or to establish centres of excellence to accelerate data initiatives, when only about 1 in 4 executives reported that their organisation has successfully forged a data culture.'– Randy Bean, 2020

Data literacy is an essential part of a data-driven culture

• In a data-driven culture, decisions are made based on data evidence, not on gut instinct.
• Data often has untapped potential. A data-driven culture builds tools and skills, builds users' trust in the condition and sources of data, and raises the data skills and understanding among their people on the front lines.
• Building a data culture takes an ongoing investment of time, effort, and money. This investment will not achieve the transformation you want without data literacy at the grassroots level.

Data-driven culture = 'data matters to our company'

Despite investments in data initiative, organisations are carrying high levels of data debt

Data debt is 'the accumulated cost that is associated with the sub-optimal governance of data assets in an enterprise, like technical debt.'

Data debt is a problem for 78% of organisations.

40% of organisations say individuals within the business do not trust data insights.

66% of organisations say a backlog of data debt is impacting new data management initiatives.

33% of organisations are not able to get value from a new system or technology investment.

30% of organisations are unable to become data-driven.

Source: Experian, 2020

Absent or sub-optimal data governance leads to data debt

Only 3% of companies' data meets basic quality standards. (Source: Nagle, et al., 2017)

Organisations suspect 28% of their customer and prospect data is inaccurate in some way. (Source: Experian, 2020)

Only 51% of organisations consider the current state of their CRM or ERP data to be clean, allowing them to fully leverage it. (Source: Experian, 2020)

35% of organisations say they're not able to see a ROI for data management initiatives. (Source: Experian, 2020)

Embrace the technology

Make the available data governance tools and technology work for you:

• Data catalogue
• Business data glossary
• Data lineage
• Metadata management

While data governance tools and technologies are no panacea, leverage their automated and AI-enabled capabilities to augment your data governance program.

Measure success to demonstrate tangible business value

Put data governance into the context of the business:

• Tie the value of data governance and its initiatives back to the business capabilities that are enabled.
• Leverage the KPIs of those business capabilities to demonstrate tangible and measurable value. Use terms and language that will resonate with senior leadership.

Don't let measurement be an afterthought:

Start substantiating early on how you are going to measure success as your data governance program evolves.

Build a right-sized roadmap

Formulate an actionable roadmap that is right-sized to deliver value in your organisation.

Key considerations:

• When building your data governance roadmap, ensure you do so through an enterprise lens. Be cognizant of other initiatives that might be coming down the pipeline that may require you to align your data governance milestones accordingly.
• Apart from doing your planning with consideration for other big projects or launches that might be in-flight and require the time and attention of your data governance partners, also be mindful of the more routine yet still demanding initiatives.
• When doing your roadmapping, consider factors like the organisation's fiscal cycle, typical or potential year-end demands, and monthly/quarterly reporting periods and audits. Initiatives such as these are likely to monopolise the time and focus of personnel key to delivering on your data governance milestones.

Sample milestones:

Data Governance Leadership & Org Structure Definition

Define the home for data governance and other key roles around ownership and stewardship, as approved by senior leadership.

Data Governance Charter and Policies

Create a charter for your program and build/refresh associated policies.

Data Culture Diagnostic

Understand the organisation's current data culture, perception of data, value of data, and knowledge gaps.

Use Case Build and Prioritisation

Build a use case that is tied to business capabilities. Prioritise accordingly.

Business Data Glossary

Build and/or refresh the business' glossary for addressing data definitions and standardisation issues.

Tools & Technology

Explore the tools and technology offering in the data governance space that would serve as an enabler to the program. (e.g. RFI, RFP).

Key takeaways for effective business-driven data governance

Data governance leadership and sponsorship is key.

Ensure strategic business alignment.

Build and foster a culture of data excellence.

Evolve along the data journey.

Make data governance an enabler, not a hindrance.

Insight summary

Overarching insight

Your organisation's value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face the impact of elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and exposure to increased business risk.

Insight 1

Data governance should not sit as an island in your organisation. It must continuously align with the organisation's enterprise governance function. It shouldn't be perceived as a pet project of IT, but rather as an enterprise-wide, business-driven initiative.

Insight 2

Ensure your data governance program delivers measurable business value by aligning the associated data governance initiatives with the business architecture. Leverage the measures of success or KPIs of the underlying business capabilities to demonstrate the value data governance has yielded for the organisation.

Insight 3

Data governance remains the foundation of all forms of reporting and analytics. Advanced capabilities such as AI and machine learning require effectively governed data to fuel their success.

Tactical insight

Tailor your data literacy program to meet your organisation's needs, filling your range of knowledge gaps and catering to your different levels of stakeholders. When it comes to rolling out a data literacy program, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Your data literacy program is intended to fill the knowledge gaps about data, as they exist in your organisation. It should be targeted across the board – from your executive leadership and management through to the subject matter experts across different lines of the business in your organisation.

Info-Tech's methodology for establishing data governance

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook

Use the Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook as you plan, build, roll out, and scale data governance in your organisation.

Data Use Case Framework Template

This template takes you through a business needs gathering activity to highlight and create relevant use cases around the organisation's data-related problems and opportunities.

Business Data Glossary

Use this template to document the key data assets that are to be governed and create a data flow diagram for your organisation.

Data Culture Diagnostic and Scorecard

Leverage Info-Tech's Data Culture Diagnostic to understand how your organisation scores across 10 areas relating to data culture.

Key deliverable:

Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Data Governance Initiative Planning and Roadmap Tool

Leverage this tool to assess your current data governance capabilities and plot your target state accordingly.

This tool will help you plan the sequence of activities, capture start dates and expected completion dates, and create a roadmap that can be effectively communicated to the organisation.

Data Governance Program Charter Template

This template will help get the backing required to get a data governance project rolling. The program charter will help communicate the project purpose, define the scope, and identify the project team, roles, and responsibilities.

Data Governance Policy

This policy establishes uniformed data governance standards and identifies the shared responsibilities for assuring the integrity of the data and that it efficiently and effectively serves the needs of your organisation

Other Deliverables:

• Data Governance Initiative Planning and Roadmap Tool
• Data Governance Program Charter Template
• Data Governance Policy

Blueprint benefits

Defined data accountability & responsibility

Shared knowledge & common understanding of data assets

Elevated trust & confidence in traceable data

Improved data ROI & reduced data debt

Support for ethical use and handling of data in a culture of excellence

Measure the value of this blueprint

Leverage this blueprint's approach to ensure your data governance initiatives align and support your key value streams and their business capabilities.

• Aligning your data governance program and its initiatives to your organisation's business capabilities is vital for tracing and demonstrating measurable business value for the program.
• This alignment of data governance with value streams and business capabilities enables you to use business-defined KPIs and demonstrate tangible value.

In phases 1 and 2 of this blueprint, we will help you establish the business context, define your business drivers and KPIs, and understand your current data governance capabilities and strengths.

In phase 3, we will help you develop a plan and a roadmap for addressing any gaps and improving the relevant data governance capabilities so that data is well positioned to deliver on those defined business metrics.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

'Our team, has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.'

Guided Implementation

'Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keeps us on track.'

Workshop

'We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.'

Consulting

'Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.'

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Establish Data Governance project overview

Contact your account representative for more information. workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organisation. A typical GI is between 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

Workshop overview

Contact your account representative for more information. workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Phase 1

Build Business and User Context

'When business users are invited to participate in the conversation around data with data users and IT, it adds a fundamental dimension — business context. Without a real understanding of how data ties back to the business, the value of analysis and insights can get lost.' – Jason Lim, Alation

This phase will guide you through the following activities:

• Identify Your Business Capabilities
• Define your Organisation's Key Business Capabilities
• Develop a Strategy Map that Aligns Business Capabilities to Your Strategic Focus

This phase involves the following participants:

• Data Governance Leader/Data Leader (CDO)
• Senior Business Leaders
• Business SMEs
• Data Leadership, Data Owners, Data Stewards and Custodians

Step 1.1

Substantiate Business Drivers

Activities

1.1.1 Identify Your Business Capabilities

1.1.2 Categorise Your Organisation's Key Business Capabilities

1.1.3 Develop a Strategy Map Tied to Data Governance

This step will guide you through the following activities:

• Leverage your organisation's existing business capability map or initiate the formulation of a business capability map, guided by Info-Tech's approach
• Determine which business capabilities are considered high priority by your organisation
• Map your organisation's strategic objectives to value streams and capabilities to communicate how objectives are realised with the support of data

Outcomes of this step

• A foundation for data governance initiative planning that's aligned with the organisation's business architecture: value streams, business capability map, and strategy map

Info-Tech Insight

Gaining a sound understanding of your business architecture (value streams and business capabilities) is a critical foundation for establishing and sustaining a data governance program that delivers measurable business value.

1.1.1 Identify Your Business Capabilities

Confirm your organisation's existing business capability map or initiate the formulation of a business capability map:

1. If you have an existing business capability map, meet with the relevant business owners/stakeholders to confirm that the content is accurate and up to date. Confirm the value streams (how your organisation creates and captures value) and their business capabilities are reflective of the organisation's current business environment.
2. If you do not have an existing business capability map, follow this activity to initiate the formulation of a map (value streams and related business capabilities):
   1. Define the organisation's value streams. Meet with senior leadership and other key business stakeholders to define how your organisation creates and captures value.
   2. Define the relevant business capabilities. Meet with senior leadership and other key business stakeholders to define the business capabilities.

Note: A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation. Business capabilities are business terms defined using descriptive nouns such as 'Marketing' or 'Research and Development.' They represent stable business functions, are unique and independent of each other, and typically will have a defined business outcome.

Input

• List of confirmed value streams and their related business capabilities

Output

• Business capability map with value streams for your organisation

Materials

• Your existing business capability map or the template provided in the Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook accompanying this blueprint

Participants

• Key business stakeholders
• Data stewards
• Data custodians
• Data Governance Working Group

For more information, refer to Info-Tech's Document Your Business Architecture.

Define or validate the organisation's value streams

Value streams connect business goals to the organisation's value realisation activities. These value realisation activities, in turn, depend on data.

If the organisation does not have a business architecture function to conduct and guide Activity 1.1.1, you can leverage the following approach:

• Meet with key stakeholders regarding this topic, then discuss and document your findings.
• When trying to identify the right stakeholders, consider: Who are the decision makers and key influencers? Who will impact this piece of business architecture related work? Who has the relevant skills, competencies, experience, and knowledge about the organisation?
• Engage with these stakeholders to define and validate how the organisation creates value.
• Consider:
  • Who are your main stakeholders? This will depend on the industry in which you operate. For example, customers, residents, citizens, constituents, students, patients.
  • What are your stakeholders looking to accomplish?
  • How does your organisation's products and/or services help them accomplish that?
  • What are the benefits your organisation delivers to them and how does your organisation deliver those benefits?
  • How do your stakeholders receive those benefits?

Align data governance to the organisation's value realisation activities.

Value streams enable the organisation to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

Info-Tech Insight

Your organisation's value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face the possibilities of elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, negative impact to reputation and brand, and/or increased exposure to business risk.

Example of value streams – Retail Banking

Value streams connect business goals to the organisation's value realisation activities.

Example value stream descriptions for: Retail Banking

Value streams enable the organisation to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

For this value stream, download Info-Tech's Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Retail Banking.

Example of value streams – Higher Education

Value streams connect business goals to the organisation's value realisation activities.

Example value stream descriptions for: Higher Education

Value streams enable the organisation to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

For this value stream, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Higher Education.

Example of value streams – Local Government

Value streams connect business goals to the organisation's value realisation activities.

Example value stream descriptions for: Local Government

Value streams enable the organisation to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

For this value stream, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Local Government.

Example of value streams – Manufacturing

Value streams connect business goals to the organisation's value realisation activities.

Example value stream descriptions for: Manufacturing

Value streams enable the organisation to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

For this value stream, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Manufacturing.

Example of value streams – Retail

Value streams connect business goals to the organisation's value realisation activities.

Example value stream descriptions for: Retail

Value streams enable the organisation to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

For this value stream, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Retail.

Define the organisation's business capabilities in a business capability map

A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation. Business capabilities represent stable business functions and typically will have a defined business outcome.

Business capabilities can be thought of as business terms defined using descriptive nouns such as 'Marketing' or 'Research and Development.'

If your organisation doesn't already have a business capability map, you can leverage the following approach to build one. This initiative requires a good understanding of the business. By working with the right stakeholders, you can develop a business capability map that speaks a common language and accurately depicts your business.

Working with the stakeholders as described above:

• Analyse the value streams to identify and describe the organisation's capabilities that support them.
• Consider: What is the objective of your value stream? (This can highlight which capabilities support which value stream.)
• As you initiate your engagement with your stakeholders, don't start a blank page. Leverage the examples on the next slides as a starting point for your business capability map.
• When using these examples, consider: What are the activities that make up your particular business? Keep the ones that apply to your organisation, remove the ones that don't, and add any needed.

Align data governance to the organisation's value realisation activities.

Info-Tech Insight

A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organisation's business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

For more information, refer to Info-Tech's Document Your Business Architecture.

Example business capability map – Retail Banking

A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organisation's business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

Info-Tech Tip:

Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realisation capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

Example business capability map for: Retail Banking

For this business capability map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Retail Banking.

Example business capability map – Higher Education

A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organisation's business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

Info-Tech Tip:

Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realisation capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

Example business capability map for: Higher Education

For this business capability map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Higher Education.

Example business capability map – Local Government

A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organisation's business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

Info-Tech Tip:

Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realisation capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

Example business capability map for: Local Government

For this business capability map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Local Government.

Example business capability map – Manufacturing

A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organisation's business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

Info-Tech Tip:

Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realisation capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

Example business capability map for: Manufacturing

For this business capability map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Manufacturing.

Example business capability map - Retail

A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organisation's business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

Info-Tech Tip:

Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realisation capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

Example business capability map for: Retail

For this business capability map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Retail.

1.1.2 Categorise Your Organisation's Key Capabilities

Determine which capabilities are considered high priority in your organisation.

1. Categorise or heatmap the organisation's key capabilities. Consult with senior and other key business stakeholders to categorise and prioritise the business' capabilities. This will aid in ensuring your data governance future state planning is aligned with the mandate of the business. One approach to prioritising capabilities with business stakeholders is to examine them through the lens of cost advantage creators, competitive advantage differentiators, and/or by high value/high risk.
2. Identify cost advantage creators. Focus on capabilities that drive a cost advantage for your organisation. Highlight these capabilities and prioritise programs that support them.
3. Identify competitive advantage differentiators. Focus on capabilities that give your organisation an edge over rivals or other players in your industry.

This categorisation/prioritisation exercise helps highlight prime areas of opportunity for building use cases, determining prioritisation, and the overall optimisation of data and data governance.

Input

• Strategic insight from senior business stakeholders on the business capabilities that drive value for the organisation

Output

• Business capabilities categorised and prioritised (e.g. cost advantage creators, competitive advantage differentiators, high value/high risk)

Materials

• Your existing business capability map or the business capability map derived in the previous activity

Participants

• Key business stakeholders
• Data stewards
• Data custodians
• Data Governance Working Group

For more information, refer to Info-Tech's Document Your Business Architecture.

Example of business capabilities categorisation or heatmapping – Retail

This exercise is useful in ensuring the data governance program is focused and aligned to support the priorities and direction of the business.

• Depending on the mandate from the business, priority may be on developing cost advantage. Hence the capabilities that deliver efficiency gains are the ones considered to be cost advantage creators.
• The business' priority may be on maintaining or gaining a competitive advantage over its industry counterparts. Differentiation might be achieved in delivering unique or enhanced products, services, and/or experiences, and the focus will tend to be on the capabilities that are more end-stakeholder-facing (e.g. customer-, student-, patient,- and/or constituent-facing). These are the organisation's competitive advantage creators.

Example: Retail

For this business capability map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Retail.

1.1.3 Develop a Strategy Map Tied to Data Governance

Identify the strategic objectives for the business. Knowing the key strategic objectives will drive business-data governance alignment. It's important to make sure the right strategic objectives of the organisation have been identified and are well understood.

1. Meet with senior business leaders and other relevant stakeholders to help identify and document the key strategic objectives for the business.
2. Leverage their knowledge of the organisation's business strategy and strategic priorities to visually represent how these map to value streams, business capabilities, and, ultimately, to data and data governance needs and initiatives. Tip: Your map is one way to visually communicate and link the business strategy to other levels of the organisation.
3. Confirm the strategy mapping with other relevant stakeholders.

Guide to creating your map: Starting with strategic objectives, map the value streams that will ultimately drive them. Next, link the key capabilities that enable each value stream. Then map the data and data governance to initiatives that support those capabilities. This is one approach to help you prioritise the data initiatives that deliver the most value to the organisation.

Input

• Strategic objectives as outlined by the organisation's business strategy and confirmed by senior leaders

Output

• A strategy map that maps your organisational strategic objectives to value streams, business capabilities, and, ultimately, to data program

Materials

• Your existing business capability map or the one created in the previous step
• The strategy map template provided in the Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook
• Business strategy

Participants

• Key business stakeholders
• Data stewards
• Data custodians
• Data Governance Working Group

Download Info-Tech's Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook

Example of a strategy map tied to data governance

• Strategic objectives are the outcomes that the organisation is looking to achieve.
• Value streams enable an organisation to create and capture value in the market through interconnected activities that support strategic objectives.
• Business capabilities define what a business does to enable value creation in value streams.
• Data capabilities and initiatives are descriptions of action items on the data and data governance roadmap and which will enable one or multiple business capabilities in its desired target state.

Info-Tech Tip:

Start with the strategic objectives, then map the value streams that will ultimately drive them. Next, link the key capabilities that enable each value stream. Then map the data and data governance initiatives that support those capabilities. This process will help you prioritise the data initiatives that deliver the most value to the organisation.

Example: Retail

For this strategy map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Retail.

Step 1.2

Build High-Value Use Cases for Data Governance

Activities

1.2.1 Build High-Value Use Cases

This step will guide you through the following activities:

• Leveraging your categorised business capability map to conduct deep-dive sessions with key business stakeholders for creating high-value uses cases
• Discussing current challenges, risks, and opportunities associated with the use of data across the lines of business
• Exploring which other business capabilities, stakeholder groups, and business units will be impacted

Outcomes of this step

• Relevant use cases that articulate the data-related challenges, needs, or opportunities that are clear and contained and, if addressed ,will deliver value to the organisation

Info-Tech Tip

One of the most important aspects when building use cases is to ensure you include KPIs or measures of success. You have to be able to demonstrate how the use case ties back to the organisational priorities or delivers measurable business value. Leverage the KPIs and success factors of the business capabilities tied to each particular use case.

1.2.1 Build High-Value Use Cases

This business needs-gathering activity will highlight and create relevant use cases around data-related problems or opportunities that are clear and contained and, if addressed, will deliver value to the organisation.

1. Bring together key business stakeholders (data owner, stewards, SMEs) from a particular line of business as well as the relevant data custodian(s) to build cases for their units. Leverage the business capability map you created for facilitating this act.
2. Leverage Info-Tech's framework for data requirements and methodology for creating use cases, as outlined in the Data Use Case Framework Template and seen on the next slide.
3. Have the stakeholders move through each breakout session outlined in the Use Case Worksheet. Use flip charts or a whiteboard to brainstorm and document their thoughts.
4. Debrief and document results in the Data Use Case Framework Template.
5. Repeat this exercise with as many lines of the business as possible, leveraging your business capability map to guide your progress and align with business value.

Tip: Don't conclude these use case discussions without substantiating what measures of success will be used to demonstrate the business value of the effort to produce the desired future state, as relevant to each particular use case.

This business needs-gathering activity will highlight and create relevant use cases around data-related problems or opportunities that are clear and contained and, if addressed, will deliver value to the organisation.

1. Bring together key business stakeholders (data owner, stewards, SMEs) from a particular line of business as well the relevant data custodian(s) to build cases for their units. Leverage the business capability map you created for facilitating this act.
2. Leverage Info-Tech's framework for data requirements and methodology for creating use cases, as outlined in the Data Use Case Framework Template and seen on the next slide.
3. Have the stakeholders move through each breakout session outlined in the Use Case Worksheet. Use flip charts or a whiteboard to brainstorm and document their thoughts.
4. Debrief and document results in the Data Use Case Framework Template
5. Repeat this exercise with as many lines of the business as possible, leveraging your business capability map to guide your progress and align with business value.

Tip: Don't conclude these use case discussions without substantiating what measures of success will be used to demonstrate the business value of the effort to produce the desired future state, as relevant to each particular use case.

Input

• Value streams and business capabilities as defined by business leaders
• Business stakeholders' subject area expertise
• Data custodian systems, integration, and data knowledge

Output

• Use cases that articulate data-related challenges, needs or opportunities that are tied to defined business capabilities and hence if addressed will deliver measurable value to the organisation.

Materials

• Your business capability map from activity 1.1.1
• Info-Tech's Data Use Case Framework Template
• Whiteboard or flip charts (or shared screen if working remotely)
• Markers/pens

Participants

• Key business stakeholders
• Data stewards and business SMEs
• Data custodians
• Data Governance Working Group

Download Info-Tech's Data Use Case Framework Template

Info-Tech's Framework for Building Use Cases

Objective: This business needs-gathering activity will highlight and create relevant use cases around data-related problems or opportunities that are clear and contained and, if addressed, will deliver value to the organisation.

Leveraging your business capability map, build use cases that align with the organisation's key business capabilities.

Consider:

• Is the business capability a cost advantage creator or an industry differentiator?
• Is the business capability currently underserved by data?
• Does this need to be addressed? If so, is this risk- or value-driven?

Info-Tech's Data Requirements and Mapping Methodology for Creating Use Cases

1. What business capability (or capabilities) is this use case tied to for your business area(s)?
2. What are your data-related challenges in performing this today?
3. What are the steps in this process/activity today?
4. What are the applications/systems used at each step today?
5. What data domains are involved, created, used, and/or transformed at each step today?
6. What does an ideal or improved state look like?
7. What other business units, business capabilities, activities, and/or processes will be impacted or improved if this issue was solved?
8. Who are the stakeholders impacted by these changes? Who needs to be consulted?
9. What are the risks to the organisation (business capability, revenue, reputation, customer loyalty, etc.) if this is not addressed?
10. What compliance, regulatory, and/or policy concerns do we need to consider in any solution?
11. What measures of success or change should we use to prove the value of the effort (such as KPIs, ROI)? What is the measurable business value of doing this?

The resulting use cases are to be prioritised and leveraged for informing the business case and the data governance capabilities optimisation plan.

Taken from Info-Tech's Data Use Case Framework Template

Phase 2

Understand Your Current Data Governance Capabilities

This phase will guide you through the following activities:

• Understand the Key Components of Data Governance
• Gauge Your Organisation's Current Data Culture

This phase involves the following participants:

• Data Leadership
• Data Ownership & Stewardship
• Policies & Procedures
• Data Literacy & Culture
• Operating Model
• Data Management
• Data Privacy & Security
• Enterprise Projects & Services

Step 2.1

Understand the Key Components of Data Governance

This step will guide you through the following activities:

• Understanding the core components of an effective data governance program and determining your organisation's current capabilities in these areas:
  • Data Leadership
  • Data Ownership & Stewardship
  • Policies & Procedures
  • Data Literacy & Culture
  • Operating Model
  • Data Management
  • Data Privacy & Security
  • Enterprise Projects & Services

Outcomes of this step

• An understanding of the core components of an effective data governance program
• An understanding your organisation's current data governance capabilities

Leverage Info-Tech's: Data Governance Initiative Planning and Roadmap Tool to assess your current data governance capabilities and plot your target state accordingly.

This tool will help your organisation plan the sequence of activities, capture start dates and expected completion dates, and create a roadmap that can be effectively communicated to the organisation.

Review: Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework

Key components of data governance

A well-defined data governance program will deliver:

• Defined accountability and responsibility for data.
• Improved knowledge and common understanding of the organisation's data assets.
• Elevated trust and confidence in traceable data.
• Improved data ROI and reduced data debt.
• An enabling framework for supporting the ethical use and handling of data.
• A foundation for building and fostering a data-driven and data-literate organisational culture.

The key components of establishing sustainable enterprise data governance, taken from Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework:

• Data Leadership
• Data Ownership & Stewardship
• Operating Model
• Policies & Procedures
• Data Literacy & Culture
• Data Management
• Data Privacy & Security
• Enterprise Projects & Services

Data Leadership

• Data governance needs a dedicated head or leader to steer the organisation's data governance program.
• For organisations that do have a chief data officer (CDO), their office is the ideal and effective home for data governance.
• Heads of data governance also have titles such as director of data governance, director of data quality, and director of analytics.
• The head of your data governance program works with all stakeholders and partners to ensure there is continuous enterprise governance alignment and oversight and to drive the program's direction.
• While key stakeholders from the business and IT will play vital data governance roles, the head of data governance steers the various components, stakeholders, and initiatives, and provides oversight of the overall program.
• Vital data governance roles include: data owners, data stewards, data custodians, data governance steering committee (or your organisation's equivalent), and any data governance working group(s).

The role of the CDO: the voice of data

The office of the chief data officer (CDO):

• Has a cross-organisational vision and strategy for data.
• Owns and drives the data strategy; ensures it supports the overall organisational strategic direction and business goals.
• Leads the organisational data initiatives, including data governance
• Is accountable for the policy, strategy, data standards, and data literacy necessary for the organisation to operate effectively.
• Educates users and leaders about what it means to be 'data-driven.'
• Builds and fosters a culture of data excellence.

'Compared to most of their C-suite colleagues, the CDO is faced with a unique set of problems. The role is still being defined. The chief data officer is bringing a new dimension and focus to the organisation: "data." '
– Carruthers and Jackson, 2020

Who does the CDO report to?

• The CDO should be a true C- level executive.
• Where the organisation places the CDO role in the structure sends an important signal to the business about how much it values data.

'The title matters. In my opinion, you can't have a CDO without executive authority. Otherwise no one will listen.'

– Anonymous European CDO

'The reporting structure depends on who's the 'glue' that ties together all these uniquely skilled individuals.'

– John Kemp, Senior Director, Executive Services, Info-Tech Research Group

Data Ownership & Stewardship

Who are best suited to be data owners?

• Wherever they may sit in your organisation, data owners will typically have the highest stake in that data.
• Data owners needs to be suitably senior and have the necessary decision-making power.
• They have the highest interest in the related business data domain, whether they are the head of a business unit or the head of a line of business that produces data or consumes data (or both).
• If they are neither of these, it's unlikely they will have the interest in the data (in terms of its quality, protection, ethical use, and handling, for instance) necessary to undertake and adopt the role effectively.

Data owners are typically senior business leaders with the following characteristics:

• Positioned to accept accountability for their data domain.
• Hold authority and influence to affect change, including across business processes and systems, needed to improve data quality, use, handling, integration, etc.
• Have access to a budget and resources for data initiatives such as resolving data quality issues, data cleansing initiatives, business data catalogue build, related tools and technology, policy management, etc.
• Hold the influence needed to drive change in behaviour and culture.
• Act as ambassadors of data and its value as an organisational strategic asset.

Right-size your data governance organisational structure

• Most organisations strive to identify roles and responsibilities at a strategic, and operational level. Several factors will influence the structure of the program such as the focus of the data governance project as well as the maturity and size of the organisation.
• Your data governance structure has to work for your organisation, and it has to evolve as the organisation evolves.
• Formulate your blend of data governance roles, committees, councils, and cross-functional groups, that make sense for your organisation.
• Your data governance organisational structure should not add complexity or bureaucracy to your organisation's data landscape; it should support and enable your principle of treating data as an asset.

There is no one-size-fits-all data governance organisational structure.

Critical roles and responsibilities for data governance

Data Governance Working Groups

Data governance working groups:

• Are cross-functional teams
• Deliver on data governance projects, initiatives, and ad hoc review committees.

Data Stewards

Traditionally, data stewards:

• Serve on an operational level addressing issues related to adherence to standards/procedures, monitoring data quality, raising issues identified, etc.
• Are responsible for managing access, quality, escalating issues, etc.

Data Custodians

• Traditionally, data custodians:

• Serve on an operational level addressing issues related to data and database administration.
• Support the management of access, data quality, escalating issues, etc.
• Are SMEs from IT and database administration.

Example: Business capabilities to data owner and data stewards mapping for a selected data domain

Info-Tech Insight

Your organisation's value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and exposure to increased business risk.

Enabling business capabilities with data governance role definitions

Operating Model

Your operating model is the key to designing and operationalizing a form of data governance that delivers measurable business value to your organisation.

'Generate excitement for data: When people are excited and committed to the vision of data enablement, they're more likely to help ensure that data is high quality and safe.' – Petzold, et al., 2020

Operating Model

Defining your data governance operating model will help create a well-oiled program that sustainably delivers value to the organisation and manages risks while building and fostering a culture of data excellence along the way. Some organisations are able to establish a formal data governance office, whether independent or attached to the office of the chief data officer. Regardless of how you are organised, data governance requires a home, a leader, and an operating model to ensure its sustainability and evolution.

Examples of focus areas for your operating model:

• Delivery: While there are core tenets to every data governance program, there is a level of variability in the implementation of data governance programs across organisations, sectors, and industries. Every organisation has its own particular drivers and mandates, so the level and rigour applied will also vary.

The key is to determine what style will work best in your organisation, taking into consideration your organisational culture, executive leadership support (present and ongoing), catalysts such as other enterprise-wide transformative and modernisation initiatives, and/or regulatory and compliances drivers.

• Communication: Communication is vital across all levels and stakeholder groups. For instance, there needs to be communication from the data governance office up to senior leadership, as well as communication within the data governance organisation, which is typically made up of the data governance steering committee, data governance council, executive sponsor/champion, data stewards, and data custodians and working groups.

Furthermore, communication with the wider organisation of data producers, users, and consumers is one of the core elements of the overall data governance communications plan.

Communication is vital for ensuring acceptance of new processes, rules, guidelines, and technologies by all data producers and users as well as for sharing success stories of the program.

Operating Model

Tie the value of data governance and its initiatives back to the business capabilities that are enabled.

'Leading organisations invest in change management to build data supporters and convert the sceptics. This can be the most difficult part of the program, as it requires motivating employees to use data and encouraging producers to share it (and ideally improve its quality at the source)[.]' – Petzold, et al., 2020

Operating Model

Examples of focus areas for your operating model (continued):

• Change management and issue resolution: Data governance initiatives will very likely bring about a level of organisational disruption, with governance recommendations and future state requiring potentially significant business change. This may include a redesign of a substantial number of data processes affecting various business units, which will require tweaking the organisation's culture, thought processes, and procedures surrounding its data.

Preparing people for change well in advance will allow them to take the steps necessary to adapt and reduce potential confrontation. By planning for and efficiently communicating any changes that a data governance initiative may bring, many initial issues can be resolved from the outset.

Attempting to implement change without an effective communications plan can result in disagreements over data control and stalemates between stakeholder units. The recommendations of the governance group must reflect the needs of all stakeholders or there will be pushback.

• Performance measuring, monitoring and reporting: Measuring and reporting on performance, successes, and realisation of tangible business value are a must for sustaining, growing, and scaling your data governance program.

Aligning your data governance to the organisation's value realisation activities enables you to leverage the KPIs of those business capabilities to demonstrate tangible and measurable value. Use terms and language that will resonate with your senior business leadership.

Info-Tech Tip:

Launching a data governance program will bring with it a level of disruption to the culture of the organisation. That disruption doesn't have to be detrimental if you are prepared to manage the change proactively and effectively.

Policies, Procedures & Standards

'Data standards are the rules by which data are described and recorded. In order to share, exchange, and understand data, we must standardise the format as well as the meaning.' – U.S. Geological Survey

Policies, Procedures & Standards

• When defining, updating, or refreshing your data policies, procedures, and standards, ensure they are relevant, serve a purpose, and/or support the use of data in the organisation.
• Avoid the common pitfall of building out a host of policies, procedures, and standards that are never used or followed by users and therefore don't bring value or serve to mitigate risk for the organisation.
• Data policies can be thought of as formal statements and are typically created, approved, and updated by the organisation's data decision-making body (such as a data governance steering committee).
• Data standards and procedures function as actions, or rules, that support the policies and their statements.
• Standards and procedures are designed to standardise the processes during the overall data lifecycle. Procedures are instructions to achieve the objectives of the policies. The procedures are iterative and will be updated with approval from your data governance committee as needed.
• Your organisation's data policies, standards, and procedures should not bog down or inhibit users; rather, they should enable confident data use and handling across the overall data lifecycle. They should support more effective and seamless data capture, integration, aggregation, sharing, and retention of data in the organisation.

Examples of data policies:

• Data Classification Policy
• Data Retention Policy
• Data Entry Policy
• Data Backup Policy
• Data Provenance Policy
• Data Management Policy

See Info-Tech's Data Governance Policy Template: This policy establishes uniformed data governance standards and identifies the shared responsibilities for assuring the integrity of the data and that it efficiently and effectively serves the needs of your organisation.

Data Domain Documentation

Select the correct granularity for your business need

Sources: Dataversity; Atlan; Analytics8

Data Domain Documentation Examples

Data Culture

'Organisational culture can accelerate the application of analytics, amplify its power, and steer companies away from risky outcomes.' – Petzold, et al., 2020

A healthy data culture is key to amplifying the power of your data and to building and sustaining an effective data governance program.

What does a healthy data culture look like?

• Everybody knows the data.
• Everybody trusts the data.
• Everybody talks about the data.

Building a culture of data excellence.

Leverage Info-Tech's Data Culture Diagnostic to understand your organisation's culture around data.

Contact your Info-Tech Account Representative for more information on the Data Culture Diagnostic

Cultivating a data-driven culture is not easy

'People are at the heart of every culture, and one of the biggest challenges to creating a data culture is bringing everyone into the fold.' – Lim, Alation

It cannot be purchased or manufactured,

It must be nurtured and developed,

And it must evolve as the business, user, and data landscapes evolve.

'Companies that have succeeded in their data-driven efforts understand that forging a data culture is a relentless pursuit, and magic bullets and bromides do not deliver results.' – Randy Bean, 2020

Hallmarks of a data-driven culture

There is a trusted, single source of data the whole company can draw from.

There's a business glossary and data catalogue and users know what the data fields mean.

Users have access to data and analytics tools. Employees can leverage data immediately to resolve a situation, perform an activity, or make a decision – including frontline workers.

Data literacy, the ability to collect, manage, evaluate, and apply data in a critical manner, is high.

Data is used for decision making. The company encourages decisions based on objective data and the intelligent application of it.

A data-driven culture requires a number of elements:

• High-quality data
• Broad access and data literacy
• Data-driven decision-making processes
• Effective communication

Data Literacy

Data literacy is an essential part of a data-driven culture.

• Building a data-driven culture takes an ongoing investment of time, effort, and money.
• This investment will not realise its full return without building up the organisation's data literacy.
• Data literacy is about filling data knowledge gaps across all levels of the organisation.
• It's about ensuring all users – senior leadership right through to core users – are equipped with appropriate levels of training, skills, understanding, and awareness around the organisation's data and the use of associated tools and technologies. Data literacy ensures users have the data they need and they know how to interpret and leverage it.
• Data literacy drives the appetite, demand, and consumption for data.
• A data-literate culture is one where the users feel confident and skilled in their use of data, leveraging it for making informed or evidence-based decisions and generating insights for the organisation.

Data Management

• Data governance serves as an enabler to all of the core components that make up data management:
  • Data quality management
  • Data architecture management
  • Data platform
  • Data integration
  • Data operations management
  • Data risk management
  • Reference and master data management (MDM)
  • Document and content management
  • Metadata management
  • Business intelligence (BI), reporting, analytics and advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML)
• Key tools such as the business data glossary and data catalogue are vital for operationalizing data governance and in supporting data management disciplines such as data quality management, metadata management, and MDM as well as BI, reporting, and analytics.

Enterprise Projects & Services

• Data governance serves as an enabler to enterprise projects and services that require, use, share, sell, and/or rely on data for their viability and, ultimately, their success.
• Folding or embedding data governance into the organisation's project management function or project management office (PMO) serves to ensure that, for any initiative, suitable consideration is given to how data is treated.
• This may include defining parameters, following standards and procedures around bringing in new sources of data, integrating that data into the organisation's data ecosystem, using and sharing that data, and retaining that data post-project completion.
• The data governance function helps to identify and manage any ethical issues, whether at the start of the project and/or throughout.
• It provides a foundation for asking relevant questions as it relates to the use or incorporation of data in delivering the specific project or service. Do we know where the data obtained from? Do we have rights to use that data? Are there legislations, policies, or regulations that guide or dictate how that data can be used? What are the positive effects, negative impacts, and/or risks associated with our intended use of that data? Are we positioned to mitigate those risks?
• Mature data governance creates organisations where the above considerations around data management and the ethical use and handling of data is routinely implemented across the business and in the rollout and delivery of projects and services.

Data Privacy & Security

• Data governance supports the organisation's data privacy and security functions.
• Key tools include the data classification policy and standards and defined roles around data ownership and data stewardship. These are vital for operationalizing data governance and supporting data privacy, security, and the ethical use and handling of data.
• While some organisations may have a dedicated data security and privacy group, data governance provides an added level of oversight in this regard.
• Some of the typical checks and balances include ensuring:
  • There are policies and procedures in place to restrict and monitor staff's access to data (one common way this is done is according to job descriptions and responsibilities) and that these comply with relevant laws and regulations.
  • There's a data classification scheme in place where data has been classified on a hierarchy of sensitivity (e.g. top secret, confidential, internal, limited, public).
  • The organisation has a comprehensive data security framework, including administrative, physical, and technical procedures for addressing data security issues (e.g. password management and regular training).
  • Risk assessments are conducted, including an evaluation of risks and vulnerabilities related to intentional and unintentional misuse of data.
  • Policies and procedures are in place to mitigate the risks associated with incidents such as data breaches.
  • The organisation regularly audits and monitors its data security.

Ethical Use & Handling of Data

Data governance will support your organisation's ethical use and handling of data by facilitating definition around important factors, such as:

• What are the various data assets in the organisation and what purpose(s) can they be used for? Are there any limitations?
• Who is the related data owner? Who holds accountability for that data? Who will be answerable?
• Where was the data obtained from? What is the intended use of that data? Do you have rights to use that data? Are there legislations, policies, or regulations that guide or dictate how that data can be used?
• What are the positive effects, negative impacts, and/or risks associated with the use of that data?

Ethical Use & Handling of Data

• Data governance serves as an enabler to the ethical use and handling of an organisation's data.
• The Open Data Institute (ODI) defines data ethics as: 'A branch of ethics that evaluates data practices with the potential to adversely impact on people and society – in data collection, sharing and use.'
• Data ethics relates to good practice around how data is collected, used and shared. It's especially relevant when data activities have the potential to impact people and society, whether directly or indirectly (Open Data Institute, 2019).
• A failure to handle and use data ethically can negatively impact an organisation's direct stakeholders and/or the public at large, lead to a loss of trust and confidence in the organisation's products and services, lead to financial loss, and impact the organisation's brand, reputation, and legal standing.
• Data governance plays a vital role is building and managing your data assets, knowing what data you have, and knowing the limitations of that data. Data ownership, data stewardship, and your data governance decision-making body are key tenets and foundational components of your data governance. They enable an organisation to define, categorise, and confidently make decisions about its data.

Step 2.2

Gauge Your Organisation's Current Data Culture

Activities

2.2.1 Gauge Your Organisation's Current Data Culture

This step will guide you through the following activities:

• Conduct a data culture survey or leverage Info-Tech's Data Culture Diagnostic to increase your understanding of your organisation's data culture

Outcomes of this step

• An understanding of your organisational data culture

2.2.1 Gauge Your Organisation's Current Data Culture

Conduct a Data Culture Survey or Diagnostic

The objectives of conducting a data culture survey are to increase the understanding of the organisation's data culture, your users' appetite for data, and their appreciation for data in terms of governance, quality, accessibility, ownership, and stewardship. To perform a data culture survey:

1. Identify members of the data user base, data consumers, and other key stakeholders for surveying.
2. Conduct an information session to introduce Info-Tech's Data Culture Diagnostic survey. Explain the objective and importance of the survey and its role in helping to understand the organisation's current data culture and inform the improvement of that culture.
3. Roll out the Info-Tech Data Culture Diagnostic survey to the identified users and stakeholders.
4. Debrief and document the results and scorecard in the Data Strategy Stakeholder Interview Guide and Findings document.

Input

• Email addresses of participants in your organisation who should receive the survey

Output

• Your organisation's Data Culture Scorecard for understanding current data culture as it relates to the use and consumption of data
• An understanding of whether data is currently perceived to be an asset to the organisation

Materials

• Info-Tech's Data Culture Diagnostic service

Participants

• Participants include those at the senior leadership level through to middle management, as well as other business stakeholders at varying levels across the organisation
• Data owners, stewards, and custodians
• Core data users and consumers

Contact your Info-Tech Account Representative for details on launching a Data Culture Diagnostic.

Phase 3

Build a Target State Roadmap and Plan

'Achieving data success is a journey, not a sprint. Companies that set a clear course, with reasonable expectations and phased results over a period of time, get to the destination faster.' – Randy Bean, 2020

This phase will guide you through the following activities:

• Build your Data Governance Roadmap
• Develop a target state plan comprising of prioritised initiatives

This phase involves the following participants:

• Data Governance Leadership
• Data Owners/Data Stewards
• Data Custodians
• Data Governance Working Group(s)

Step 3.1

Formulate an Actionable Roadmap and Right-Sized Plan

This step will guide you through the following activities:

• Build your data governance roadmap
• Develop a target state plan comprising of prioritised initiatives

Download Info-Tech's Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook

See Info-Tech's Data Governance Program Charter Template: A program charter template to sell the importance of data governance to senior executives.

This template will help get the backing required to get a data governance project rolling. The program charter will help communicate the project purpose, define the scope, and identify the project team, roles, and responsibilities.

Outcomes of this step

• A foundation for data governance initiative planning that's aligned with the organisation's business architecture: value streams, business capability map, and strategy map

Build a right-sized roadmap

Formulate an actionable roadmap that is right sized to deliver value in your organisation.

Key considerations:

• When building your data governance roadmap, ensure you do so through an enterprise lens. Be cognizant of other initiatives that might be coming down the pipeline that may require you to align your data governance milestones accordingly.
• Apart from doing your planning with consideration for other big projects or launches that might be in-flight and require the time and attention of your data governance partners, also be mindful of the more routine yet still demanding initiatives.
• When doing your roadmapping, consider factors like the organisation's fiscal cycle, typical or potential year-end demands, and monthly/quarterly reporting periods and audits. Initiatives such as these are likely to monopolise the time and focus of personnel key to delivering on your data governance milestones.

Sample milestones:

Data Governance Leadership & Org Structure Definition

Define the home for data governance and other key roles around ownership and stewardship, as approved by senior leadership.

Data Governance Charter and Policies

Create a charter for your program and build/refresh associated policies.

Data Culture Diagnostic

Understand the organisation's current data culture, perception of data, value of data, and knowledge gaps.

Use Case Build and Prioritisation

Build a use case that is tied to business capabilities. Prioritise accordingly.

Business Data Glossary/catalogue

Build and/or refresh the business' glossary for addressing data definitions and standardisation issues.

Tools & Technology

Explore the tools and technology offering in the data governance space that would serve as an enabler to the program. (e.g. RFI, RFP).

Recall: Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework

Build an actionable roadmap

Data Governance Leadership & Org Structure Division

Define key roles for getting started.

Use Case Build & Prioritisation

Start small and then scale – deliver early wins.

Literacy Program

Start understanding data knowledge gaps, building the program, and delivering.

Tools & Technology

Make the available data governance tools and technology work for you.

Key components of your data governance roadmap

Data Governance Program Charter Template – A program charter template to sell the importance of data governance to senior executives.

This template will help get the backing required to get a data governance project rolling. The program charter will help communicate the project purpose, define the scope, and identify the project team, roles, and responsibilities.

By now, you have assessed current data governance environment and capabilities. Use this assessment, coupled with the driving needs of your business, to plot your data Governance roadmap accordingly.

Sample data governance roadmap milestones:

• Define data governance leadership.
• Define and formalise data ownership and stewardship (as well as the role IT/data management will play as data custodians).
• Build/confirm your business capability map and data domains.
• Build business data use cases specific to business capabilities.
• Define business measures/KPIs for the data governance program (i.e. metrics by use case that are relevant to business capabilities).
• Data management:
  • Build your data glossary or catalogue starting with identified and prioritised terms.
  • Define data domains.
• Design and define the data governance operating model (oversight model definition, communication plan, internal marketing such as townhalls, formulate change management plan, RFP of data governance tool and technology options for supporting data governance and its administration).
• Data policies and procedures:
  • Formulate, update, refresh, consolidate, rationalise, and/or retire data policies and procedures.
  • Define policy management and administration framework (i.e. roll-out, maintenance, updates, adherence, system to be used).
• Conduct Info-Tech's Data Culture Diagnostic or survey (across all levels of the organisation).
• Define and formalise the data literacy program (build modules, incorporate into LMS, plan lunch and learn sessions).
• Data privacy and security: build data classification policy, define classification standards.
• Enterprise projects and services: embed data governance in the organisation's PMO, conduct 'Data Governance 101' for the PMO.

Defining data governance roles and organisational structure at Organisation

The approach employed for defining the data governance roles and supporting organisational structure for .

Key Considerations:

• The data owner and data steward roles are formally defined and documented within the organisation. Their involvement is clear, well-defined, and repeatable.
• There are data owners and data stewards for each data domain within the organisation. The data steward role is given to someone with a high degree of subject matter expertise.
• Data owners and data stewards are effective in their roles by ensuring that their data domain is clean and free of errors and that they protect the organisation against data loss.
• Data owners and data stewards have the authority to make final decisions on data definitions, formats, and standard processes that apply to their respective data sets. Data owners and data stewards have authority regarding who has access to certain data.
• Data owners and data stewards are not from the IT side of the organisation. They understand the lifecycle of the data (how it is created, curated, retrieved, used, archived, and destroyed) and they are well-versed in any compliance requirements as it relates to their data.
• The data custodian role is formally defined and is given to the relevant IT expert. This is an individual with technical administrative and/or operational responsibility over data (e.g. a DBA).
• A data governance steering committee exists and is comprised of well-defined roles, responsibilities, executive sponsors, business representatives, and IT experts.
• The data governance steering committee works to provide oversight and enforce policies, procedures, and standards for governing data.
• The data governance working group has cross-functional representation. This comprises business and IT representation, as well as project management and change management where applicable: data stewards, data custodians, business subject matter experts, PM, etc.).
• Data governance meetings are coordinated and communicated about. The meeting agenda is always clear and concise, and meetings review pressing data-related issues. Meeting minutes are consistently documented and communicated.

Sample: Business capabilities to data owner and data stewards mapping for a selected data domain

Info-Tech Insight

Your organisation's value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and exposure to increased business risk.

Enable business capabilities with data governance role definitions.

Consider your technology options:

Make the available data governance tools and technology work for you:

• Data catalogue
• Business data glossary
• Data lineage
• Metadata management

These are some of the data governance tools and technology players. Check out SoftwareReviews for help making better software decisions.

Make the data steward the catalyst for organisational change and driving data culture

The data steward must be empowered and backed politically with decision-making authority, or the role becomes stale and powerless.

Ensuring compliance can be difficult. Data stewards may experience pushback from stakeholders who must deliver on the policies, procedures, and processes that the data steward enforces.

Because the data steward must enforce data processes and liaise with so many different people and departments within the organisation, the data steward role should be their primary full-time job function – where possible.

However, in circumstances where budget doesn't allow a full-time data steward role, develop these skills within the organisation by adding data steward responsibilities to individuals who are already managing data sets for their department or line of business.

Info-Tech Tip

A stewardship role is generally more about managing the cultural change that data governance brings. This requires the steward to have exceptional interpersonal skills that will assist in building relationships across departmental boundaries and ensuring that all stakeholders within the organisation believe in the initiative, understand the anticipated outcomes, and take some level of responsibility for its success.

Changes to organisational data processes are inevitable; have a communication plan in place to manage change

Create awareness of your data governance program. Use knowledge transfer to get as many people on board as possible.

Data governance initiatives must contain a strong organisational disruption component. A clear and concise communication strategy that conveys milestones and success stories will address the various concerns that business unit stakeholders may have.

By planning for and efficiently communicating any changes that a data governance initiative may bring, many initial issues can be resolved from the outset.

Governance recommendations will require significant business change. The redesign of a substantial number of data processes affecting various business units will require an overhaul of the organisation's culture, thought processes, and procedures surrounding its data. Preparing people for change well in advance will allow them to take the necessary steps to adapt and reduce potential confrontation.

Because a data governance initiative will involve data-driven business units across the organisation, the governance team must present a compelling case for data governance to ensure acceptance of new processes, rules, guidelines, and technologies by all data producers and users.

Attempting to implement change without an effective communication plan can result in disagreements over data control and stalemates between stakeholder units. The recommendations of the governance group must reflect the needs of all stakeholders or there will be pushback.

Info-Tech Insight

Launching a data governance initiative is guaranteed to disrupt the culture of the organisation. That disruption doesn't have to be detrimental if you are prepared to manage the change proactively and effectively.

Create a common data governance vision that is consistently communicated to the organisation

A data governance program should be an enterprise-wide initiative.

To create a strong vision for data governance, there must be participation from the business and IT. A common vision will articulate the state the organisation wishes to achieve and how it will reach that state. Visioning helps to develop long-term goals and direction.

Once the vision is established, it must be effectively communicated to everyone, especially those who are involved in creating, managing, disposing, or archiving data.

The data governance program should be periodically refined. This will ensure the organisation continues to incorporate best methods and practices as the organisation grows and data needs evolve.

Info-Tech Tips

• Use information from the stakeholder interviews to derive business goals and objectives.
• Work to integrate different opinions and perspectives into the overall vision for data governance.
• Brainstorm guiding principles for data and understand the overall value to the organisation.

Develop a compelling data governance communications plan to get all departmental lines of business on board

A data governance program will impact all data-driven business units within the organisation.

A successful data governance communications plan involves making the initiative visible and promoting staff awareness. Educate the team on how data is collected, distributed, and used, what internal processes use data, and how that data is used across departmental boundaries.

By demonstrating how data governance will affect staff directly, you create a deeper level of understanding across lines of business, and ultimately, a higher level of acceptance for new processes, rules, and guidelines.

A clear and concise communications strategy will raise the profile of data governance within the organisation, and staff will understand how the program will benefit them and how they can share in the success of the initiative. This will end up providing support for the initiative across the board.

A proactive communications plan will:

• Assist in overcoming issues with data control, stalemates between stakeholder units, and staff resistance.
• Provide a formalised process for implementing new policies, rules, guidelines, and technologies, and managing organisational data.
• Detail data ownership and accountability for decision making, and identify and resolve data issues throughout the organisation.
• Encourage acceptance and support of the initiative.

Info-Tech Tip

Focus on literacy and communication: include training in the communication plan. Providing training for data users on the correct procedures for updating and verifying the accuracy of data, data quality, and standardised data policies will help validate how data governance will benefit them and the organisation.

Leverage the data governance program to communicate and promote the value of data within the organisation

The data governance program is responsible for continuously promoting the value of data to the organisation. The data governance program should seek a variety of ways to educate the organisation and data stakeholders on the benefit of data management.

Even if data policies and procedures are created, they will be highly ineffective if they are not properly communicated to the data producers and users alike.

There needs to be a communication plan that highlights how the data producer and user will be affected, what their new responsibilities are, and the value of that change.

To learn how to manage organisational change, refer to Info-Tech's Master Organisational Change Management Practices.

Understand what makes for an effective policy for data governance

It can be difficult to understand what a policy is, and what it is not. Start by identifying the differences between a policy and standards, guidelines, and procedures.

The following are key elements of a good policy:

Leverage myPolicies, Info-Tech's web-based application for managing your policies and procedures

Most organisations have problems with policy management. These include:

1. Policies are absent or out of date
2. Employees largely unaware of policies in effect
3. Policies are unmonitored and unenforced
4. Policies are in multiple locations
5. Multiple versions of the same policy exist
6. Policies managed inconsistently across different silos
7. Policies are written poorly by untrained authors
8. Inadequate policy training program
9. Draft policies stall and lose momentum
10. Weak policy support from senior management

Technology should be used as a means to solve these problems and effectively monitor, enforce, and communicate policies.

Product Overview

myPolicies is a web-based solution to create, distribute, and manage corporate policies, procedures, and forms. Our solution provides policy managers with the tools they need to mitigate the risk of sanctions and reduce the administrative burden of policy management. It also enables employees to find the documents relevant to them and build a culture of compliance.

Some key success factors for policy management include:

• Store policies in a central location that is well known and easy to find and access. A key way that technology can help communicate policies is by having them published on a centralised website.
• Link this repository to other policies' taxonomies of your organisation. E.g. HR policies to provide a single interface for employees to access guidance across the organisation.
• Reassess policies annually at a minimum. myPolicies can remind you to update the organisation's policies at the appropriate time.
• Make the repository searchable and easily navigable.
• myPolicies helps you do all this and more.

Enforce data policies to promote consistency of business processes

Data policies are short statements that seek to manage the creation, acquisition, integrity, security, compliance, and quality of data. These policies vary amongst organisations, depending on your specific data needs.

• Policies describe what to do, while standards and procedures describe how to do something.
• There should be few data policies, and they should be brief and direct. Policies are living documents and should be continuously updated to respond to the organisation's data needs.
• The data policies should highlight who is responsible for the data under various scenarios and rules around how to manage it effectively.

Examples of Data Policies

Trust

• Data Cleansing and Quality Policy
• Data Entry Policy

Availability

• Acceptable Use Policy
• Data Backup Policy

Security

• Data Security Policy
• Password Policy Template
• User Authorisation, Identification, and Authentication Policy Template
• Data Protection Policy

Compliance

• Archiving Policy
• Data Classification Policy
• Data Retention Policy

Leverage data management-related policies to standardise your data management practices

Info-Tech's Data Management Policy:

This policy establishes uniform data management standards and identifies the shared responsibilities for assuring the integrity of the data and that it efficiently and effectively serves the needs of the organisation. This policy applies to all critical data and to all staff who may be creators and/or users of such data.

Info-Tech's Data Entry Policy:

The integrity and quality of data and evidence used to inform decision making is central to both the short-term and long-term health of an organisation. It is essential that required data be sourced appropriately and entered into databases and applications in an accurate and complete manner to ensure the reliability and validity of the data and decisions made based on the data.

Info-Tech's Data Provenance Policy:

Create policies to keep your data's value, such as:

• Only allow entry of data from reliable sources.
• Employees entering and accessing data must observe requirements for capturing/maintaining provenance metadata.
• Provenance metadata will be used to track the lifecycle of data from creation through to disposal.

Info-Tech's Data Integration and Virtualisation Policy:

This policy aims to assure the organisation, staff, and other interested parties that data integration, replication, and virtualisation risks are taken seriously. Staff must use the policy (and supporting guidelines) when deciding whether to integrate, replicate, or virtualise data sets.

Select the right mix of metrics to successfully supervise data policies and processes

Policies are only as good as your level of compliance. Ensure supervision controls exist to oversee adherence to policies and procedures.

Although they can be highly subjective, metrics are extremely important to data governance success.

• Establishing metrics that measure the performance of a specific process or data set will:
  • Create a greater degree of ownership from data stewards and data owners.
  • Help identify underperforming individuals.
  • Allow the steering committee to easily communicate tailored objectives to individual data stewards and owners.
• Be cautious when establishing metrics. The wrong metrics can have negative repercussions.
  • They will likely draw attention to an aspect of the process that doesn't align with the initial strategy.
  • Employees will work hard and grow frustrated as their successes aren't accurately captured.

Policies are great to have from a legal perspective, but unless they are followed, they will not benefit the organisation.

• One of the most useful metrics for policies is currency. This tracks how up to date the policy is and how often employees are informed about the policy. Often, a policy will be introduced and then ignored. Policies must be continuously reviewed by management and employees.
• Some other metrics include adherence (including performance in tests for adherence) and impacts from non-adherence.

Review metrics on an ongoing basis with those data owners/stewards who are accountable, the data governance steering committee, and the executive sponsors.

Establish data standards and procedures for use across all organisational lines of business

A data governance program will impact all data-driven business units within the organisation.

• Data management procedures are the methods, techniques, and steps to accomplish a specific data objective. Creating standard data definitions should be one of the first tasks for a data governance steering committee.
• Data moves across all departmental boundaries and lines of business within the organisation. These definitions must be developed as a common set of standards that can be accepted and used enterprise wide.
• Consistent data standards and definitions will improve data flow across departmental boundaries and between lines of business.
• Ensure these standards and definitions are used uniformly throughout the organisation to maintain reliable and useful data.

Data standards and procedural guidelines will vary from company to company.

Examples include:

• Data modelling and architecture standards.
• Metadata integration and usage procedures.
• Data security standards and procedures.
• Business intelligence standards and procedures.

Info-Tech Tip

Have a fundamental data definition model for the entire business to adhere to. Those in the positions that generate and produce data must follow the common set of standards developed by the steering committee and be accountable for the creation of valid, clean data.

Changes to organisational data processes are inevitable; have a communications plan in place to manage change

Create awareness of your data governance program, using knowledge transfer to get as many people on board as possible.

By planning for and efficiently communicating any changes that a data governance initiative may bring, many initial issues can be resolved from the outset.

Governance recommendations will require significant business change. The redesign of a substantial number of data processes affecting various business units will require an overhaul of the organisation's culture, thought processes, and procedures surrounding its data. Preparing people for change well in advance will allow them to take the necessary steps to adapt and reduce potential confrontation.

Because a data governance initiative will involve data-driven business units across the organisation, the governance team must present a compelling case for data governance to ensure acceptance of new processes, rules, guidelines, and technologies by all data producers and users.

Attempting to implement change without an effective communications plan can result in disagreements over data control and stalemates between stakeholder units. The recommendations of the governance group must reflect the needs of all stakeholders or there will be pushback.

Data governance initiatives will very likely bring about a level of organisational disruption. A clear and concise communications strategy that conveys milestones and success stories will address the various concerns that business unit stakeholders may have.

Info-Tech Tip

Launching a data governance program will bring with it a level of disruption to the culture of the organisation. That disruption doesn't have to be detrimental if you are prepared to manage the change proactively and effectively.

Other Deliverables:

The list of supporting deliverables will help to kick start on some of the Data Governance initiatives

• Data Classification Policy, Standard, and Procedure
• Data Quality Policy, Standard, and Procedure
• Metadata Management Policy, Standard, and Procedure
• Data Retention Policy and Procurement

Data Classification Policy, Standard, and Procedure

Data Retention Policy and Procedure

Metadata Management Policy, Standard, and Procedure

Data Quality Policy, Standard, and Procedure

Additional Support

If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech Workshop.

Contact your account representative for more information.

workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team. Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech's historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

Build Your Business and User Context

Work with your core team of stakeholders to build out your data governance strategy map, aligning data governance initiatives with business capabilities, value streams, and, ultimately, your strategic priorities.

Formulate a Plan to Get to Your Target State

Develop a data governance future state roadmap and plan based on an understanding of your current data governance capabilities, your operating environment, and the driving needs of your business.

Related Info-Tech Research

Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy

Key to building and fostering a data-driven culture.

Create a Data Management Roadmap

Streamline your data management program with our simplified framework.

The First 100 Days as CDO

Be the voice of data in a time of transformation.

Research Contributors

Bibliography

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Allott, Joseph, et al. “Data: The Next Wave in Forestry Productivity.” McKinsey & Company, 27 Oct. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Bean, Randy. “Why Culture Is the Greatest Barrier to Data Success.” MIT Sloan Management Review, 30 Sept. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Brence, Thomas. “Overcoming the Operationalization Challenge With Data Governance at New York Life.” Informatica, 18 March 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Bullmore, Simon, and Stuart Coleman. “ODI Inside Business – A Checklist for Leaders.” Open Data Institute, 19 Oct. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Canadian Institute for Health Information. “Developing and Implementing Accurate National Standards for Canadian Health Care Information.” Canadian Institute for Health Information. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Carruthers, Caroline, and Peter Jackson. “The Secret Ingredients of the Successful CDO.” IRM UK Connects, 23 Feb. 2017.

Dashboards. “Useful KPIs for Healthy Hospital Quality Management.” Dashboards. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Dashboards. “Why (and How) You Should Improve Data Literacy in Your Organization Today.” Dashboards. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Datapine. “Healthcare Key Performance Indicators and Metrics.” Datapine. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Datapine. “KPI Examples & Templates: Measure what matters the most and really impacts your success.” Datapine. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Diaz, Alejandro, et al. “Why Data Culture Matters.” McKinsey Quarterly, Sept. 2018. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Everett, Dan. “Chief Data Officer (CDO): One Job, Four Roles.” Informatica, 9 Sept. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Experian. “10 Signs You Are Sitting On A Pile Of Data Debt.” Experian. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Fregoni, Silvia. “New Research Reveals Why Some Business Leaders Still Ignore the Data.” Silicon Angle, 1 Oct. 2020

Informatica. Holistic Data Governance: A Framework for Competitive Advantage. Informatica, 2017. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Knight, Michelle. “What Is a Data Catalog?” Dataversity, 28 Dec. 2017. Web.

Lim, Jason. “Alation 2020.3: Getting Business Users in the Game.” Alation, 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

McDonagh, Mariann. “Automating Data Governance.” Erwin, 29 Oct. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

NewVantage Partners. Data-Driven Business Transformation: Connecting Data/AI Investment to Business Outcomes. NewVantage Partners, 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Olavsrud, Thor. “What Is Data Governance? A Best Practices Framework For Managing Data Assets.” CIO.com, 18 March 2021. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Open Data Institute. “Introduction to Data Ethics and the Data Ethics Canvas.” Open Data Institute, 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Open Data Institute. “The UK National Data Strategy 2020: Doing Data Ethically.” Open Data Institute, 17 Nov. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Open Data Institute. “What Is the Data Ethics Canvas?” Open Data Institute, 3 July 2019. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Pathak, Rahul. “Becoming a Data-Driven Enterprise: Meeting the Challenges, Changing the Culture.” MIT Sloan Management Review, 28 Sept. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Petzold, Bryan, et al. “Designing Data Governance That Delivers Value.” McKinsey & Company, 26 June 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Redman, Thomas, et al. “Only 3% of Companies’ Data Meets Basic Quality Standards.” Harvard Business Review. 11 Sept 2017.

Smaje, Kate. “How Six Companies Are Using Technology and Data To Transform Themselves.” McKinsey & Company, 12 Aug. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Talend. “The Definitive Guide to Data Governance.” Talend. Accessed 25 June 2021.

“The Powerfully Simple Modern Data Catalog.” Atlan, 2021. Web.

U.S. Geological Survey. “Data Management: Data Standards.” U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Waller, David. “10 Steps to Creating a Data-Driven Culture.” Harvard Business Review, 6 Feb. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

“What Is the Difference Between A Business Glossary, A Data Dictionary, and A Data Catalog, and How Do They Play A Role In Modern Data Management?” Analytics8, 23 June 2021. Web.

Wikipedia. “RFM (Market Research).” Wikipedia. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Windheuser, Christoph, and Nina Wainwright. “Data in a Modern Digital Business.” Thoughtworks, 12 May 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Wright, Tom. “Digital Marketing KPIs - The 12 Key Metrics You Should Be Tracking.” Cascade, 3 March 2021. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Learning objectives

Describe the benefits of virtual teams.

Create a plan for adopting effective management practices and setting clear expectations with virtual teams.

Identify potential solutions to the challenges of managing performance and developing members of virtual teams.

Create an action plan to increase effectiveness in managing virtual teams.

Target audience

People managers who manage or plan to manage virtual teams.

Training length

Two three-hour sessions

Training material

• Use the speaker’s notes in the notes pane section of each slide to plan and practice the training session.
• Activity slides are scattered throughout this training deck and are clearly numbered in the slide title.
• Notes in italics are written to the facilitator and are not meant to be read aloud.
• Download the Workbook for participants to use.

Suggested materials for activities:

• Index cards or sticky notes
• Markers
• Whiteboard/large table space/flip chart

Agenda & activities

Recommended Customization

Review all slides and adjust the language or content as needed to suit your organizational context and culture.

The pencil icon to the left denotes slides requiring customization of the slide and/or the speaker’s notes, e.g. adding in an organization-specific process.

Customization instructions are found in the notes pane.

Tips

• Adjust the speaker’s notes on the slides before (or after) any slides you modify or delete to ensure logical transitions between slides.
• Update the agenda to reflect new timings if major modifications are made.
• Even seasoned leaders need to be reminded of the basics now and again. Rather than delete more basic slides, cut back on the amount of time spent covering them and frame the content as a refresher.

• Participant Workbooks
• Relevant organization-specific documents (see side panel)
• Training Session Feedback Form

Required Information

• Communication guidelines for managers (e.g. cadence of manager interactions)
• Performance management process and guidelines
• Employee development guidelines
• List of available resources (e.g. social collaboration tools)

Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Section 1.1

Practical foundations for managing teams in a remote environment

Feasibility of virtual IT teams

Most organizations are planning some combination of remote and onsite work in 2022.

Source: IT Talent Trends, 2022; n=199

Speaker’s Notes:

Most organizations are planning some combination of remote and onsite work in 2022 – the highest reported plans for WFH were hybrid, balanced, and partial work-from-home. This builds on our findings in the IT Talent Trends 2022 report.

Feasibility of virtual IT teams

What percentage of roles in IT are capable of being performed remotely permanently?

Approximately what percentage of roles in IT are capable of being performed remotely permanently?

IT Talent Trends, 2022; n=207

Speaker’s Notes:

80% of respondents estimated that 50 to 100% of IT roles can be performed remotely.

Virtual teams take all kinds of forms

A virtual team is any team that has members that are not colocated and relies on technology for communications.

Speaker’s Notes:

Before we start, it will be useful to review what we mean by the term “virtual team.” For our purposes we will be defining a virtual team as any team that has members that are not colocated and relies on technology for communications.

There are a wide variety of virtual work arrangements and a variety of terms used to describe them. For example, some common terms include:

• “Flexible work arrangements”: Employees have the option to work where they see fit (within certain constraints). They may choose to work from the office, home, a shared office space, the road, etc.
• “Remote work,” “work from home,” and “telecommuting”: These are just various ways of describing how or where people are working virtually. They all share the idea that these kinds of employees are not colocated.
• “Multi-office team”: the team members all work in office environments, but they may not always be in the same office as their team members or manager.

Our definition of virtual work covers all of these terms. It is also distance neutral, meaning that it applies equally to teams that are dispersed globally or regionally or even those working in the same cities but dispersed throughout different buildings. Our definition also applies whether virtual employees work full time or part time.

The challenges facing managers arise as soon as some team members are not colocated and have to rely on technology to communicate and coordinate work. Greater distances between employees can complicate challenges (e.g. time zone coordination), but the core challenges of managing virtual teams are the same whether those workers are merely located in different buildings in the same city or in different buildings on different continents.

1.1 What kind of virtual team do you lead?

15 Minutes

Working on your own, take five minutes to figure out what kind of virtual team you lead.

1. How many people on your team work virtually (all, most, or a small percentage)?
2. How often and how regularly do they tend to work virtually (full time, part time regularly, or part time as needed)?
3. What kinds of virtual work arrangements are there on your team (multi-site, work from home, mobile employees)?
4. Where do your workers tend to be physically located (different offices but in the same city/region or globally dispersed)?
5. Record this information in your workbook.
6. Discuss as a group.

Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Input

• Size of virtual team
• Current remote work practices

Output

• Documented list of current state of remote work

Materials

• Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Participants

• All managers with direct reports working virtually

Advantages

Speaker’s Notes:

Remote work arrangements are becoming more and more common, and for good reason: there are a lot of benefits to the organization – and to employees.

#1: Save Money

Perhaps one of the most common reasons for opting for remote-work arrangements is the potential cost savings. One study found that organizations could save about $11,000 per employee working from home half the time (Global Workplace Analytics, 2021).

#2 Increased Attraction

In addition, supporting remote-work arrangements can attract employees. One study found that 71% of employees would likely choose one employer over another based on WFH offerings (Owl Labs, 2019).

#3 Improve productivity.

There are also improvements to productivity. Fifty percent of employees report they would maintain or increase their productivity while working from home (Glassdoor Team, 2020).

Remote work also has benefits to employees.

#1: Save Money

As with organizations, employees also benefit financially from remote work arrangements, saving between $2,500 and $4,000 and on average 11 working days while working from home half of the time.

#2: Improved Wellbeing

Most employees agree that working from home makes them happier, reduces stress, and provides an improved work-life balance through increased flexibility.

Challenges

Organizations

• Concerns that WFH may stifle innovation (Scientific American, 2021), likely due to the potential lack of collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• Fewer organic opportunities for informal interaction between employees working from home means active efforts are required to foster organizational culture.

Leaders

• 42% of managers believe that monitoring the productivity of their direct reports is a top challenge of WFH (Ultimate Software, 2019).
• The lack of in-person supervision compounded with a lack of trust in employees leads many leaders to believe that WFH will result in a drop in productivity.

Employees

• 20% of employees report collaboration/communication as their top struggle with WFH (Owl Labs, 2021).
• Employees often experience burnout from working longer hours due to the lack of commute, blurring of work and home life, and the perceived need to prove their productivity.

Many of these barriers can be addressed by changing traditional mindsets and finding alternative ways of working, but the traditional approach to work is so entrenched that it has been hard to make the shift.

Speaker’s Notes:

Many organizations are still grappling with the challenges of remote work. Some are just perceived challenges, while others are quite real.

Limited innovation and a lack of informal interaction are a potential consequence of failing to properly adapt to the remote-work environment.

Leaders also face challenges with remote work. Losing in-person supervision has led to the lack of trust and a perceived drop in productivity.

A study conducted 2021 asked remote workers to identify their biggest struggle with working remotely. The top three struggles remote workers report facing are unplugging after work, loneliness, and collaborating and/or communicating.

Seeing the struggles remote workers identify is a good reminder that these employees have a unique set of challenges. They need their managers to help them set boundaries around their work; create feelings of connectedness to the organization, culture, and team; and be expert communicators.

1.2 Virtual teams: benefits and challenges

20 Minutes

1. Discuss and list:
   1. Any positives you’ve experienced since managing virtual employees.
   2. Any challenges you’ve had to manage connected to managing virtual employees.
2. Record information in the workbook.

Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Input

• Personal experiences managing remote teams

Output

• List of benefits and challenges of remote work

Materials

• Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Participants

• All managers with direct reports working virtually

Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Section 1.2

Laying the foundations for a virtual team

The 3i’s: Inform, interact, and involve your way to effective management:

Speaker’s Notes:

Effectively managing a virtual team really comes down to adopting management approaches that will engage virtual employees.

Managing a virtual team does not actually require a new management style. The basics of effective management are the same in both colocated and virtual teams; however, the emphasis on certain behaviors and actions we take often differs. Managing a virtual team requires much more thoughtfulness and planning in our everyday interactions with our teams as we cannot rely on the relative ease of face-to-face interactions available to colocated teams.

The 3i’s Engaging Management Model is useful when interacting with all employees and provides a handy framework for more planful interactions with virtual employees.

Think of your management responsibilities in these three buckets – they are the most important components of being an effective manager. We’re first going to look at inform and involve before moving on to interact.

Inform: Relay information down from senior management and leaders to employees. Communicate the rationale behind decisions and priorities, and always explain how they will directly affect employees.

Why is this important? According to McLean & Company’s Engagement Survey data, employees who say their managers keep them well informed about decisions that affect them are 3.4 times more likely to be engaged (Source: McLean & Company, 2020; N=77,363). Your first reaction to this might be “I already do this,” which may very well be the case. Keep in mind, though, we sometimes tend to communicate on a “need-to-know basis,” especially when we are stressed or short on time. Engaging employees takes more. Always focus on explaining the “why?” or the rationale behind business decisions.

It might seem like this domain should be the least affected, since important company announcements probably continue in a remote environment. But remember that information like that also flows informally. And even in formal settings, there are question-and-answer opportunities. Or maybe your employee might come to your office to ask for more details. Virtual team members can’t gather around the watercooler. They don’t have the same opportunities to hear information in passing as people who are colocated do, so managers need to make a concerted effort to share information with virtual team members in a clear and timely way.

Swinging over to the other end, we have involve: Involve your employees. Solicit information and feedback from employees and collaborate with them.

However, it’s not enough to just solicit their feedback and input; you also need to act on it.

Make sure you involve your employees in a meaningful way. Such collaboration makes employees feel like a valued part of the team. Not to mention that they often have information and perspectives that can help make your decisions stronger!

Employees who say their department leaders act on feedback from them are 3.9 times more likely to be engaged than those whose leaders don’t. (Source: McLean & Company, 2020; N=59,779). That is a huge difference!

Keeping virtual employees engaged and feeling connected and committed to the organization requires planful and regular application of the 3i’s model.

Finally, Interact: Connect with employees on a personal level; get to know them and understand who they are on a personal and professional level.

Why? Well, over and above the fact that it can be rewarding for you to build stronger relationships with your team, our data shows that human connection makes a significant difference with employees. Employees who believe their managers care about them as a person are 3.8 times more likely to be engaged than those who do not (Source: McLean & Company, 2017; N=70,927).

And you might find that in a remote environment, this is the area that suffers the most, since a lot of these interactions tend to be unscripted, unscheduled, and face to face.

Typically, if we weren’t in the midst of a pandemic, we’d emphasize the importance of allocating some budget to travel and get some face-to-face time with your staff. Meeting and interacting with team members face to face is crucial to building trusting relationships, and ultimately, an effective team, so given the context of our current circumstances, we recommend the use of video when interacting with your employees who are remote.

Relay information down from senior management to employees.

Ensure they’ve seen and understand any organization-wide communication.

Share any updates in a timely manner.

Connect with employees on a personal level.
Ask how they’re doing with the new work arrangement.
Express empathy for challenges (sick family member, COVID-19 diagnosis, etc.).
Ask how you can support them.
Schedule informal virtual coffee breaks a couple of times a week and talk about non-work topics.

Get information from employees and collaborate with them.
Invite their input (e.g. have a “winning remotely” brainstorming session).
Escalate any challenges you can’t address to your VP.
Give them as much autonomy over their work as possible – don’t micromanage.

1.3 Identify behaviors to inform, interact with, and involve team members

20 Minutes

Individually:

1. Identify one behavior for each of Inform, Interact, and Involve to improve.
2. Record information in the workbook.

As a group:

1. Discuss behaviors to improve for each of Inform, Interact, and Involve and record new ideas to incorporate into your leadership practice.

Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Input

• 3i's Model
• Current leadership behaviors to improve

Output

• List of behaviors to better inform, interact, and involve team members

Materials

• Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Participants

• All managers with direct reports working virtually

Laying the foundation: Set clear expectations

Tasks

• What are the daily and weekly team activities? How do they affect one another?

Goals

• Clarify any adjustments to strategy based on the situation; clarify metrics.

Communication

• How often and when will you check in? What should they come to you for? What modalities will you use and when?

Roadblocks

• Involve your team in deciding how to handle roadblocks and challenges.

Speaker’s Notes:

Clear expectations are important in any environment, remote or not. But it is much harder to do in a remote environment. The barrier to seeking clarification is so much higher (For example, email vs. catching someone in hallway, or you can’t notice that a colleague is struggling without them asking).

Communication – This is one area where the importance actually changes in a remote context. We’ve been talking about a lot of practices that are the same in importance whether you’re in an office or remote, and maybe you just enact them differently. But clarity around communication processes is actually tremendously more important in a remote environment.

Adopt a five-step process to set specific and documented expectations

1. Check in with how your team member is doing on a daily basis. Don’t forget to ask how they are doing personally.
2. Follow up on previously set expectations. Ask how things are going. Discuss if priorities or expectations have changed and update expectations accordingly.
3. Ask if they are experiencing any roadblocks and collaborate to find solutions.
4. Provide feedback and recognition as appropriate.
5. Document newly set expectations – either through a collaboration tool or through email.

Speaker’s Notes:

Suggested best practices: Hold daily team check-ins and hold separate individual check-ins. Increase frequency of these.

During Check-in

1. Set up a running Teams chat for your team.

• This is your community. You must be the biggest cheerleader and keep the team feeling like they are contributing. Make sure everyone is involved.

• Ask: What are you working on today? What will your momentum metrics be? What do you need from me?

After a Check-in

1. Be accessible:
   • Ensure your team knows the best way to get in touch with you.
   • Email is not ideal for informal, frequent contact – use messaging instead.
2. Be available:
   • Keep a running conversation going in Teams.
   • Respond in a timely manner; address issues quickly so that your team has what they need to succeed.
   • Let your team know if you’ll be away/offline for longer than an hour during the workday and ask them to do the same (e.g. for an appointment).
   • Help address roadblocks, answer questions, clarify priorities, etc.

Define communication requirements

• Set up an ongoing communication with your team.
  • E.g. a running conversation on Slack or Teams
• Schedule daily virtual meetings and check-ins.
  • This can help to maintain a sense of normalcy and conduct a pulse check on your team.
• Use video for important conversations.
  • Video chat creates better rapport, shows body language, and lessens feelings of isolation, but it can be taxing.
• Set expectations about communication.
  • Differentiate between day-to-day communication and updates on the state of events.
• Clearly communicate the collaboration toolkit.
  • What do we have available? What is the purpose of each?

Speaker’s Notes:

With organizational expectations set, we need to establish team expectations around how we collaborate and communicate.

Today there is no lack of technology available to support our virtual communication. We can use the phone, conference calls, videoconferencing, Skype, instant messaging, [insert organization-specific technological tools.], etc.

However, it is important to have a common understanding of which tools are most appropriate when and for what.

What are some of the communication channel techniques you’ve found useful in your informal interactions with employees or that you’ve seen work well between employees?

[Have participants share any technological tools they find useful and why.]

Check in with your team on communication requirements

• Should we share our calendars, hours of availability, and/or IM status?
• How often should we meet as a team and one on one? Should we institute a time when we should not communicate virtually?
• Which communication channel should we use in what context? How should we decide which communication method to use?
• Should I share guidelines for email and meeting etiquette (or any other communication methods)?
• Should we establish a new team charter?
• What feedback does the team have regarding how we’ve been communicating?

Speaker’s Notes:

Whenever we interact, we make the following kinds of social exchanges. We exchange:

• Information: Data or opinions
• Emotions: Feelings and evaluations about the data or opinions
• Motivations: What we feel like doing in response to data or opinions

We need to make sure that these exchanges are happening as each team member intends. To do this, we have to be sensitive to what information is being conveyed, what emotions are involved in the interaction, and how we are motivating each other to act through the interaction. Every interaction will have intended and unintended effects on others. No one can pay attention to all of these aspects of communication all the time, but if we develop habits that are conducive to successful exchanges in all three areas, we can become more effective.

In addition to being mindful of the exchange in our communication, as managers it is critical to build trusting relationships and rapport with employees as we saw in the 3i's model. However, in virtual teams we cannot rely on running into someone in the kitchen or hallway to have an informal conversation. We need to be thoughtful and deliberate in our interactions with employees. We need to find alternative ways to build these relationships with and between employees that are both easy and accepted by ourselves and employees. Because of that, it is important to set communication norms and really understand each other’s preferences. For example:

• Timing of responses. Set the expectation that emails should be responded to within X hours/days unless otherwise noted in the actual email.
• When it’s appropriate to send an email vs. using instant messaging.
• A team charter – the team’s objectives, individual roles and responsibilities, and communication and collaboration guidelines.

1.4 Identify and share ways you prefer to communicate for different activities

20 Minutes

1. Brainstorm and list the different types of exchanges you have with your virtual employees and they have with each other.
2. List the various communication tools in use on your team.
3. Assign a preferred communication method for each type of exchange

Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Input

• Current types of exchanges on team
• Communication methods used

Output

• Defined ways to communicate for each communication method

Materials

• Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Participants

• All managers with direct reports working virtually

Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Section 2.1
Balancing wellbeing and performance in a virtual team context

The pandemic has taken a significant toll on employees’ mental wellbeing

44% of employees reported declined mental wellbeing since the start of the pandemic.

• 44% of those who work from home.
• 34% of those who have other work arrangements (i.e. onsite).
  (Qualtrics, 2020)

"If one of our colleagues were to fall, break their leg, and get a cast, colleagues would probably rally around that person signing their cast. But, really, we don’t view the health of our brain the same as we do the health of our body."
– Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) Employee

Speaker’s Notes:

Despite being over two years into the pandemic, we are still seeing its effect on the physical and mental health of employees.

The mental health aspect has been often overlooked by organizations, but in order to have a safe, happy, and productive team, you need to give mental health the same level of focus as physical heath. This requires a change in mindset in order for you as a leader to support your team's mental wellbeing during the pandemic and beyond.

Employees are reporting several key mental wellbeing challenges

Stress: 67%

Employees report increasingly high levels of stress from the onset of COVID-19, stating that it has been the most stressful time in their careers.
(Qualtrics, 2020)

Anxiety: 57%

Similarly, employees’ anxiety levels have peaked because of the pandemic and the uncertainty it brings.
(Qualtrics, 2020)

Four main themes surrounding stress & anxiety

• Fear of contracting COVID-19
• Financial pressures
• Job security and uncertainty
• Loneliness caused by social isolation

Speaker’s Notes:

The stress and uncertainty about the future caused by the pandemic and its fallout are posing the biggest challenges to employees.

Organizations shutting down operations, moving to fully remote, or requiring some of their employees to be on site based on the current situation causes a lot of anxiety as employees are not able to plan for what is coming next.

Adding in the loss of social networks and in-person interactions exacerbates the problem employees are facing. As leaders, it is your job to understand and mitigate these challenges wherever possible.

Re-examine your workplace barriers to mental wellbeing

Key considerations:

• Work Environment
  • Accessibility of mental wellbeing programs and initiatives
• Organizational Culture
  • Modeling of wellbeing
  • Paid time off
  • Discussions around mental wellbeing
• Total Rewards
  • Benefits coverage
  • Employee assistance programs (EAPs)
  • Manager knowledge

Speaker’s Notes:

Organizational barriers to mental wellbeing are sadly not new. Workloads, stigma around mental health, lack of sick days, and limits to benefits for mental health supports were challenges before the pandemic. Adding in the new barriers can very easily result in a tipping point for many employees who are simply not equipped to deal with or supported in dealing with the added burden of remote work in a post-pandemic world.

To provide the needed support to your employees, it’s important to be mindful of the key considerations.

Holistic employee wellbeing has never been more critical than it is right now

Employee Wellbeing

Physical

The physical body; ensuring a person has the freedom, opportunities, and resources needed to sustainably maintain bodily health.

Mental

The psychological ability to cope with information, emotions, desires, and stressors (e.g. change, threats, etc.) in a healthy and balanced way. Essential for day-to-day living and functioning.

Social

The state of personal and professional relationships, including personal and community engagement. The capability for genuine, authentic, and mutually affirming interactions with others.

Financial

The state of a person’s finances; ensuring that a person feels capable to handle their financial situation and behaviors. The ability to live productively without the weight of financial stress.

Speaker’s Notes:

As a manager, you need to be mindful of all of these. Create an atmosphere where people are able to come to you for help if they are struggling in one of these areas. For example, some people might be more comfortable raising physical safety or comfort concerns (personal protective equipment, ergonomics) than concerns about mental health. Or they might feel like their feelings of loneliness are not appropriate to bring into their professional life.

Wellbeing is a delicate subject, and most of the time, people are reluctant to talk about it. It requires vulnerability. And here’s the thing about it: Your staff will not drive a change in your team around making these topics more acceptable. It has to be the manager. You have to be the one to not just tell but show them that it’s OK to talk about this

Encourage human-centered workplace behaviors

Promote empathy as a focus value

• Listen and show compassion.
• Allow room for emotions.

Encourage social connection

• Leverage networks.
• Infuse fun where possible.
• Encourage community and sense of joint purpose.

Cultivate a growth mindset

• Encourage mindfulness and resilience.
• Express gratitude.

Empower others

• Ask employees what they need and co-create solutions.
• Integrate needs of personal and family life with work life.
• Be clear on accountability.

Speaker’s Notes:

As a leader, your focus should be on encouraging the right behaviors on your team and in yourself.
Show empathy; allowing room for emotion and showing you are willing and able to listen goes a long way to establishing trust.

A growth mindset applies to resilience too. A person with a growth mindset is more likely to believe that even though they’re struggling now, they will get through it.

Infuse fun – schedule social check-ins. This is not wasted time, or time off work – it is an integral part of the workday. We have less of it now organically, so you must bring it back deliberately. Remember that theme? We are deliberately reinfusing important organic elements into the workday.

The last item, empowerment, is interesting – being clear on accountability. Have clear performance expectations. It might sound like telling people what to do would be disempowering, but it’s the opposite. By clarifying the goals of what they need to achieve, you empower them to invent their own “how,” because you and they are both sure they will arrive at the place that you agreed on. We will talk more about this in performance management.

Emphasize the importance of wellbeing by setting the tone for the team

Managers must…

• LEAD BY EXAMPLE
  • Employees look to their managers for cues about how to react in a crisis. If the manager reacts with stress and fear, the team will follow.
• ENCOURAGE OPEN COMMUNICATION
  • Frequent check-ins and transparent communication are essential during a time of crisis, especially when working remotely.
• ACKNOWLEDGE THE SITUATION
  • Recognizing the stress that teams may be facing and expressing confidence in them goes a long way.
• PROMOTE WELLBEING
  • Managers who take care of themselves can better support their teams and encourage them to practice good self-care too.
• REDUCE STIGMA
  • Reducing stigma around mental health encourages people to come forward with their struggles and get the support they need.

Speaker’s Notes:

Emphasize the importance of wellbeing with what you do. If you do not model self-care behavior, people will follow what you do, not what you say.

Lead by example – Live the behaviors you want to see in your employees. If you show confidence, positivity, and resiliency, it will filter down to your team.

Encourage open communication – Have regular meetings where your team is able to set the agenda, or allow one-on-ones to be guided by the employee. Make sure these are scheduled and keep them a priority.

Acknowledge the situation – Pretending things are normal doesn’t help the situation. Talk about the stress that the team is facing and express confidence that you will get through it together.

Promote wellbeing – Take time off, don’t work when you’re sick, and you will be better able to support your team!

Reduce stigma – Call it out when you see it and be sure to remind people of and provide access to any supports that the organization has.

Conduct dedicated conversations around wellbeing

1. Check in with how each team member is doing frequently and ask how they are doing personally.
2. Discuss how things are going. Ask: “How is your work situation working out for you so far? Do you feel supported? How are you taking care of yourself in these circumstances?”
3. Ask if there are any stressors or roadblocks that they have experienced and collaborate to find solutions.
4. Provide reassurance of your support and confidence in them.
5. Document the plan for managing stressors and roadblocks – either through a collaboration tool or through email.

Speaker’s Notes:

Going back to the idea of a growth mindset – this may be uncomfortable for you as a manager. So here’s a step-by-step guide that over time you can morph into your own style.

With your team – be prepared to share first and to show it is OK to be vulnerable and address wellbeing seriously.

1. Make sure you make time for the personal. Ask about their lives and show compassion.
2. Give opportunities for them to bring up things that might stay hidden otherwise. Ask questions that show you care.
3. Help identify areas they are struggling with and work with them to move past those areas.
4. Make sure they feel supported in what they are going through and reassured of their place on the team.
5. Roll wellbeing into your planning process. This signals to team that you see wellbeing as important, not just a checklist to cover during a team meeting, and are ready to follow through on it.

Recognize when professional help is needed

Speaker’s Notes:

As a leader, it is important to be on the lookout for warning signs of burnout and know when to step in and direct individuals to professional help.

Poor work performance – They struggle to maintain work performance, even after you’ve worked with them to create coping strategies.

Overwhelmed – They repeatedly tell you that they feel overwhelmed, very stressed, or physically unwell.

Frequent personal disclosure – They want to discuss their personal struggles at length on a regular basis.

Trouble sleeping and focusing – They tell you that they are not sleeping properly and are unable to focus on work.

Frequent time off – They feel the need to take time off more frequently.

Strained relationships – They have difficulty communicating effectively with coworkers; relationships are strained.

Substance abuse – They show signs of substance abuse (e.g. drunk/high while working, social media posts about drinking during the day).

Keeping an eye out for these signs and being able to step in before they become unmanageable can mean the difference between keeping and losing an employee experiencing burnout.

Remember: Managers also need support

• Added burden
• Lead by example
• Self-care

Speaker’s Notes:

If you’ve got managers under you, be mindful of their unique stressors. Don’t forget to check in with them, too.

If you are a manager, remember to take care of yourself and check in with your own manager about your own wellbeing.

2.1 Balance wellbeing and performance in a virtual team context

30 Minutes

1. Brainstorm and list current practices and challenges connected to wellbeing on your teams.
2. Choose one or two wellbeing challenges that are most relevant for your team.
   
3. Discuss as a group and identify one solution for each challenge that you can put into action with your own virtual team. Document this under “Action plan to move forward” on the workbook slide “2.1 Balancing wellbeing and performance in a virtual team context.”

Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Input

• Current practices and challenges connected to wellbeing

Output

• Action plan for each challenge listed

Materials

• Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Participants

• All managers with direct reports working virtually

Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Section 2.2

Managing performance in a virtual team context

Virtual employees are craving more meaningful interactions with their managers

A survey indicated that, overall, remote employees showed less satisfaction with manager interactions compared to other non-remote employees.

1. 16% less likely to strongly agree their manager involves them in setting goals at work.
2. 28% less likely to strongly agree they continually work with their manager to clarify work priorities.
3. 29% less likely to strongly agree they have reviewed their greatest successes with their manager in the last six months.
4. 30% less likely to strongly agree they have talked with their manager about progress toward goals in the last six months.

Speaker’s Notes:

In many cases, we have put people into virtual roles because they are self-directed and self-motivated workers who can thrive with the kind of autonomy and flexibility that comes with virtual work. As managers, we should expect many of these workers to be proactively interested in how they are performing and in developing their careers.

It would be a mistake to take a hands-off approach when managing virtual workers. A recent survey indicated that, overall, remote employees showed less satisfaction with manager interactions compared to other non-remote employees. It was also one of the aspects of their work experience they were least satisfied with overall (Gallup, State of the American Workplace, 2017). Simply put, virtual employees are craving more meaningful conversations with their managers.

While conversations about performance and development are important for all employees (virtual or non-virtual), managers of remote teams can have a significant positive impact on their virtual employees’ experience and engagement at work by making efforts to improve their involvement and support in these areas.

During this module we will work together to identify ways that each of us can improve how we manage the performance of our virtual employees. At the end of the module everyone will create an action plan that they can put in place with their own teams. In the next module, we go through a similar set of activities to create an action plan for our interactions with employees about their development.

Building blocks of performance management

• Goal Setting

• Setting Expectations

• Measuring Progress

• Feedback & Coaching

Speaker’s Notes:

[Include a visualization of your existing performance management process in the slide. Walk the participants through the process to remind them of what is expected. While the managers participating in the training should know this, there may be different understandings of it, or it might just be the case that it’s been a while since people looked at the official process. The intention here is merely to ensure everyone is on the same page for the purposes of the activities that follow.]

Now that we’ve reviewed performance management at a high level, let’s dive into what is currently happening with the performance management of virtual teams.

I know that you have some fairly extensive material at your organization around how to manage performance. This is fantastic. And we’re going to focus mainly on how things change in a virtual context.

When measuring progress, how do you as a manager make sure that you are comfortable not seeing your team physically at their desks? This is the biggest challenge for remote managers.

2.2 Share current performance management practices for virtual teams

30 Minutes

1. Brainstorm and list current high-level performance management practices connected to each building block. Record in your workbook.
2. Discuss current challenges connected to implementing the building blocks with virtual employees.

Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Input

• Current performance management practices
• Challenges surrounding performance management

Output

• Current state of virtual performance management defined

Materials

• Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Participants

• All managers with direct reports working virtually

Communicate the “why”: Cascade organizational goals

Speaker’s Notes:

When assisting your employees with their goals, think about the organization’s overall mission and goals to help you determine team and individual goals.

• Organizational goals: Employee goals should align with organizational goals. Goals may cascade down through the organization.
• Department or team goals: Create a clear strategy based on high-level goals for the year so employees can link short-term goals to the larger picture.
• Individual goals: Employees should draw on their individual development plan to help set performance goals.

Sometimes it’s difficult to get employees thinking about goals and they need assistance from managers. It’s also important to be clear on team goals to help guide employees in setting individual ones.

The basic idea is to show people how their individual day-to-day work contributes to the overall success of the organization. It gives them a sense of purpose and a rationale, which translates to motivation. And also helps them problem solve with more autonomy.

You’re giving people a sense of the importance of their own contribution.

How to set clear expectations for job performance

Ensure employees have a clear understanding of what’s expected for their role:

1. Review their metrics so they understand how they’re being evaluated.
2. Outline daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals.
3. If needed, help them plan when and how each part of their job should be done and what to prioritize.
4. Ask them to come to you early if they experience a roadblock so that you can help rather than having them flounder on their own.
5. Document instances where employees aren’t meeting role or performance expectations.

Speaker’s Notes:

Tailor performance goals to address any root causes of poor performance.

For example:

• If personal factors are getting in the way, work with the employee (and HR if necessary) to create a strategy to address any impediments to performing in the role.

Tips for managing performance remotely

• Reflect on one key question: What needs to happen for my direct reports to continue their work while working remotely?
• Manage for results – not employee visibility at the office.
• Use metrics to measure performance. If you don’t have any, define tasks and deliverables as clearly as possible and conduct regular check-ins.
• Work with the employee to set goals and metrics to measure progress.

Focus on results: Be flexible about how and when work gets done, as long as team members are hitting their targets.

• For example, if they have childcare duties from 3 to 5pm during school closures and want to work later in the evening to make up the time, that’s fine – as long as the work gets done.
• Set clear expectations about which work must be done during normal work hours (e.g. attend team meetings, client calls) and which can be done at other hours.
• Team members must arrange with you any nonstandard working hours before they start using an altered schedule. It is your responsibility to keep track of hours and any alternate arrangements.
• Don’t make team members feel constantly monitored (i.e. “Where were you from 10 to 11am?”); trust them until you have reason not to.

Encourage your team members to unplug: If they’re sending you emails late at night and they haven’t made an alternate work hours agreement with you, encourage them to take time away from work.

• It’s harder to unplug when working at home, and everyone needs a break to stay productive.

Avoid micromanagement with holistic performance measures

Quality

How well tasks are accomplished

Behavior

Related to specific employee actions, skills, or attitudes

Quantity

How much work gets done

Holistic measures demonstrate all the components required for optimal performance. This is the biggest driver in having comfort as a manager of a remote team and avoiding micromanagement. Typically these are set at the organizational level. You may need to adjust for individual roles, etc.

Speaker's Notes:

Metrics come in different types. One way to ensure your metrics capture the full picture is to use a mix of different kinds of metrics.

Some metrics are quantitative: they describe quantifiable or numerical aspects of the goal. This includes timeliness. On the other hand, qualitative metrics have to do with the final outcome or product. And behavioral metrics have to do with employees' actions, skills, or attitudes. Using different kinds of metrics together helps you set holistic measures, which capture all the components of optimal performance toward your goal and prevent gaming the system.

Let's take an example:

A courier might have an objective to do a good job delivering packages. An example of a quantitative measure might be that the courier is required to deliver X number of packages per day on time. The accompanying metrics would be the number of packages delivered per day and the ratio of packages delivered on time vs. late.

Can you see a problem if we use only these quantitative measures to evaluate the courier's performance?

Wait to see if anyone volunteers an answer. Discuss suggestions.

That's right, if the courier's only goal is to deliver more packages, they might start to rush, may ruin the packages, and may offer poor customer service. We can help to guard against this by implementing qualitative and behavioral measures as well. For example, a qualitative measure might be that the courier is required to deliver the packages in mint condition. And the metric would be the number of customer complaints about damaged packages or ratings on a satisfaction survey related to package condition.

For the behavioral aspect, the courier might be required to provide customer-centric service with a positive attitude. The metrics could be ratings on customer satisfaction surveys related to the courier's demeanor or observations by the manager.

Managing poor performance virtually: Look for key signs

It’s crucial to acknowledge that an employee might have an “off week” or need time to balance work and life – things that can be addressed with performance management (PM) techniques. Managers should move into the process for performance improvement when:

1. Performance fluctuates frequently or significantly.
2. Performance has dropped for an extended period of time.
3. Expectations are consistently not being met.

Key signs to look for:

• PM data/performance-related assessments
• Continual absences
• Decreased quality or quantity of output
• Frequent excuses (e.g. repeated internet outages)
• Lack of effort or follow-through
• Missed deadlines
• Poor communication or lack of responsiveness
• Failure to improve

Speaker’s notes:

• Let’s talk more about identifying low performance.
• Everybody has off days or weeks. And what if they are new to the role or new to working remotely? Their performance may be low because they need time to adjust. These sort of situations should be managed, but they don’t require moving into the process for performance improvement.
• When managing employees who are remote or working in a hybrid situation, it is important to be alert to these signs and check in with your employees on a regular basis. Aim to identify and work with employees on addressing performance issues as they arise rather than waiting until it’s too late. Depending on your availability, the needs of the employee, and the complexity of their role, check-ins could occur daily, weekly, and/or monthly. As I mentioned, for remote employees, it’s often better to check-in more frequently but for a shorter period of time.
• You want to be present in their work life and available to help them manage through roadblocks and stay on track, but try to avoid over-monitoring employees. Micromanaging can impact the manager-employee relationship and lead to the employee feeling that there is a lack of trust. Remember, the employee needs to be responsible for their own performance and improvement.
• Check-ins should not just be about the work either. Take some time to check in personally. This is particularly important when managing remotely. It enables you to build a personal relationship with the employee and also keeps you aware if there are other personal issues at play that are impacting their work.
• So, how do you know what does require performance improvement? There are three key things that you should look for that are clear signals that performance improvement is necessary:
  1. Their performance is fluctuating frequently or significantly.
  2. Their performance has dropped for an extended period of time.
  3. Expectations are consistently not being met.
• What do you think are some key signs to look for that indicate a performance issue is occurring?

Managing poor performance virtually: Conducting remote performance conversations

Video calling

Always use video calls instead of phone calls when possible so that you don’t lose physical cues and body language.

Meeting invitations

Adding HR/your leader to a meeting invite about performance may cause undue stress. Think through who needs to participate and whether they need to be included in the invite itself.

Communication

Ensure there are no misunderstandings by setting context for each discussion and having the employee reiterate the takeaways back to you.

Focus on behavior

Don’t assume the intent behind the behavior(s) being discussed. Instead, just focus on the behavior itself.

Policies

Be sure to adhere to any relevant HR policies and support systems. Working with HR throughout the process will ensure none are overlooked.

Speaker’s notes:

There are a few best practices you should follow when having performance conversations:

• First, if you are in a different work environment than your employee, always use video calls instead of phone calls whenever possible so that you don’t miss out on physical cues and body language. If videoconferencing isn’t the norm, encourage them to turn on their video. Be empathic that it can feel awkward but explain the benefits, and you will both have an easier time communicating and understanding each other.
• As I’ve mentioned, be considerate of the environment they are in. If they are in the office and you are working remotely, be sure to book a private meeting room for them to go to for the conversation. If they are working from home, be sure to check that they are prepared and able to focus on the conversation.
• Next, carefully consider who you are adding to the meeting invite and whether it’s necessary for them to be there. Adding HR or your leader to a meeting invite may cause undue stress for the employee.
• Consider the timing of the invite. Don’t send it out weeks in advance. When a performance problem exists, you’ll want to address it as soon as possible. A day or two of notice would be an ideal approach because it gives them a heads up but will not cause them extended stress or worrying.
• Be considerate about the timing of the meeting and what else they may have scheduled. For example, a Friday afternoon before they are heading off on vacation or right before they are leading an important client call would not be appropriate timing.
• As we just mentioned clear communication is critical. Ensure there are no misunderstandings by setting context for each discussion and having the employee reiterate takeaways back to you.
• Focus on the behavior and don’t assume their intent. It can be tempting to say, “I know you didn’t mean to miss the deadline,” but you don’t know what they intended. Often people are not aware of the impact their behavior can have on others.
• Lastly, be sure to adhere to any relevant HR policies and support systems. Working with HR throughout the process will ensure nothing is overlooked.

2.3 Identify challenges of current practices and propose solutions

30 Minutes

1. Select one or two challenges from the previous activity.
2. Identify one solution for each challenge that you can put into action with your own virtual team. Document in the workbook.

Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Input

• Current performance management practices
• Challenges surrounding performance management

Output

• Action plan to move forward

Materials

• Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Participants

• All managers with direct reports working virtually

Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Optional Section

Employee development in a virtual team setting

There are three main development approaches for both colocated and virtual employees

Speaker’s Notes:

As we have seen, our virtual employees crave more meaningful interactions with their managers. In addition to performance conversations, managers should also be having regular discussions with their employees about their employee development plans. One key component of these discussions is career planning. Whether you are thinking shorter term – how to become better at their current role – or longer term – how to advance beyond their current role – discussions about employee development are a great way to engage employees. Employees are ultimately responsible for creating and executing their own development plans, but managers are responsible for making sure that employees have thought through these plans and helping employees identify opportunities for executing those plans.

To help us think about our own employee development practices, identify challenges they pose when working with virtual employees, and create solutions to these challenges, it is useful to think about employee development opportunities according to three types:

1. The first kind of development opportunity is formal training. Formal training is organized and has a clearly defined curriculum and desired outcome. It usually takes the form of a group training session (like this one) or training videos or materials that employees can watch individually and on their own time. These opportunities usually end with a test or assignment that can be used to evaluate the degree to which the participant achieved the desired learning outcomes.
2. The second kind of development opportunity is relational learning. Perhaps the most common form of this type of learning is coaching or mentoring. By establishing a long-term work relationship, checking in with employees about their daily work and development goals, and sharing their own experiences and knowledge, mentors help employees reflect and draw out learning from everyday, on-the-job development activities. Other examples include a peer support group or communities of practice. In these group settings peers share best practices and work together to overcome challenges.
3. The third kind of development opportunity is experiential learning. This kind of opportunity provides employees the chance to work on real work problems, and the output of the development work can directly benefit the organization. Most people learn best by doing. On-the-job experiences that are challenging or new can force people to use and develop new skills and knowledge based on what worked effectively and what failed. Examples of experiential learning are on-the-job learning for new hires, stretch assignments, or special projects that take the employee beyond their daily routine and allow them to try new activities and develop competencies that they would not have the chance to develop as part of their regular job.

According to McLean & Company, organizations should use the “70-20-10” rule as a rough guideline when working with employees to create their development plans: 10% of the plan should be dedicated to formal training opportunities, 20% to relational learning, and 70% to experiential learning. Managers should work with employees to identify their performance and career goals, ensure that their development plans are aligned with these goals, and include an appropriate mixture of all three kinds of development opportunities.

To help identify challenges and solutions, think about how virtual work arrangements will impact the employee’s ability to leverage each type of opportunity at our organization.

Here are some examples that can help us start thinking about the kinds of challenges virtual employees on our team face:

Career Planning

• One challenge can be identifying a career path that is consistent with working virtually. If switching from a virtual arrangement to an onsite arrangement is not a viable option for an employee, some career paths may not feasibly be open to them (at least as the company is currently organized). For example, if an employee would eventually like to be promoted to a senior leadership role in their business function but all senior leaders are required to work onsite at corporate headquarters, the employee will need to consider whether such a move is possible for them. In some cases employees may be willing to do this, but in others they may not. The important thing is to have these conversations with virtual employees and avoid the assumption that all career paths can be done virtually, since that might not be the case

Formal Training

• This is probably the least problematic form of employee development for virtual employees. In many cases this kind of training is scheduled well in advance, so virtual employees may be able to join non-virtual employees in person for some group training. When this is not possible (due to distance, budget, or time zone), many forms of group training can be recorded and watched by virtual employees later. Training videos and training materials can also easily be shared with virtual employees using existing collaboration software.

Relational Learning

• One major challenge here is developing a mentoring relationship virtually. As we discussed in the module on performance management, developing relationships virtually can be challenging because people cannot rely upon the kind of informal and spontaneous interactions that occur when people are located in the same office. Mentors and mentees will have to put in more effort and planning to get to know each other and they will have to schedule frequent check-ins so that employees can reflect upon their progress and experience (with the help of their mentors) more often.
• Time zones and technology may pose potential barriers for certain candidates to be mentors. In some cases, employees that are best qualified to be mentors may not be as comfortable with collaborative software as other mentors or their mentees. If there are large time zone differences, some people who would otherwise be interested in acting as a mentor may be dissuaded. Managers need to take this into consideration if they are connecting employees with mentors or if they are thinking of taking on the mentor role themselves.

Experiential Learning

• Virtual employees risk being overlooked for special projects due to the “out of sight, out of mind” bias: When special projects come up, the temptation is to look around the room and see who is the best fit. The problem is, however, that in some cases the highest performers or best fit may not physically be in the room. In these cases it is important for managers to take on an advocate role for their employees and remind other managers that they have good virtual employees on their team that should be included or contacted. It is also important for managers to keep their team informed about these opportunities as often as possible.
• Sometimes certain projects or certain kinds of work just cannot be done virtually in a company for a variety of reasons. The experiential learning opportunities will not be open to virtual employees. If such opportunities are open to the majority of other workers in this role (potentially putting virtual employees’ career development at a disadvantage relative to their peers), managers should work with their virtual employees to identify alternative experiences. Managers may also want to consider advocating for more or for higher quality experiential learning opportunities at the organization.

Now that we have considered some general examples of challenges and solutions, let’s look at our own employee development practices and think about the practical steps we can take as managers to improve employee development for our virtual employees.

Employee development basics

• Career planning & performance improvement
• Formal training
• Relational learning
• Experiential learning

Speaker’s Notes:

[Customize this slide according to your organization’s own policies and processes for employee development. Provide useful images that outline this on the slide, and in these notes describe the processes/policies that are in place. Note: In some cases policies or processes may not be designed with virtual employees or virtual teams in mind. That is okay for the purposes of this training module. In the following activities participants will discuss how they apply these policies and processes with their virtual teams. If your organization is interested in adapting its policies/processes to better support virtual workers, it may be useful to record those conversations to supplement existing policies later.]

Now that we have considered some general examples of challenges and solutions, let’s look at our own employee development practices and think about the practical steps we can take as managers to improve employee development for our virtual employees.

2.4 Share current practices for developing employees on a virtual team

30 Minutes

1. Brainstorm and list current high-level employee development practices. Record in your workbook.
2. Discuss current challenges connected to developing virtual employees. Record in your workbook.
3. Identify one solution for each challenge that you can put into action with your own virtual team.
4. Discuss as a group.

Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Input

• Current employee development practices
• Challenges surrounding employee development

Output

• Action plan to move forward

Materials

• Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Participants

• All managers with direct reports working virtually

Refine Action Plans

2.5 Refine your action plan and commit to implementing it

30 Minutes

1. Review your action plans for consistency and overlap. Highlight any parts you may struggle to complete.
2. Meeting with your group, summarize your plans to each other. Provide feedback and discuss each other’s action plans.
3. Discuss how you can hold each other accountable.

Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Input

• Action items from previous activities.

Output

• Action plan to move forward

Materials

• Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

Participants

• All managers with direct reports working virtually

Summary of Accomplishment

• We do not need to go out and learn a new set of manager responsibilities to better manage our virtual teams; rather, we have to “dial up” certain responsibilities we already have or adjust certain approaches that we already take.
• It is important to set clear expectations. While managers are ultimately responsible for making sure expectations are set and are clearly communicated, they are not the only ones with responsibilities. Employees and managers need to work together to overcome the challenges that virtual work involves.
• Virtual employees crave meaningful interactions with their managers and team. Managers must take charge in fostering an atmosphere of openness around wellbeing and establish effective performance management strategies. By being proactive with our virtual teams’ wellness and mindful of our performance management habits, we can take significant steps toward keeping these employees engaged and productive.
• Effective management in virtual contexts requires being more deliberate than is typical in non-virtual contexts. By working as a group to identify challenges and propose solutions, we have helped each other create action plans that we can use going forward to continually improve our management practices.

If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through an info-tech workshop or guided implementation.

Contact your account representative for more information

workshops@infotech.com

1-888-670-8889

Speaker’s Notes:

First, let’s take a moment to summarize the key things we have learned today:

1. We do not need to go out and learn a new set of manager competencies to better manage our virtual teams; rather, we have to “dial up” certain competencies we already have or adjust certain approaches that we already take. In many cases we just need to be more aware of the challenges that virtual communication poses and be more planful in our approaches.
2. It is important to set clear expectations. While managers are ultimately responsible for making sure expectations are set and clearly communicated, they are not the only ones with responsibilities. Employees and managers need to work together to overcome the challenges that virtual work involves. Making sure that teams have meaningful conversations about expectations, come to a shared understanding of them, and record them will create a firm foundation for all other interactions on the virtual team.
3. Virtual employees crave meaningful interactions with their managers related to performance and employee development. By creating action plans for improving these kinds of interactions with our teams, we can take significant steps toward keeping these employees engaged and productive.
4. Effective performance management and employee development in virtual contexts require more planfulness than is required in non-virtual contexts. By working as a group to identify challenges and propose solutions, we have helped each other create action plans that we can use going forward to continually improve our management practices.

Is there anything that anyone has learned that is not on this list and that they would like to share with the group?

Finally, were there any challenges identified today that were not addressed?

[Note to facilitator: Take note of any challenges not addressed and commit to getting back to the participants with some suggested solutions.]

Additional resources

Manager Training: Lead Through Change

Train managers to navigate the interpersonal challenges associated with change management and develop their communication and leadership skills. Upload this LMS module into your learning management system to enable online training.

Manager Training: Build a Better Manager: Manage Your People

Management skills training is needed, but organizations are struggling to provide training that makes a long-term difference in the skills managers use in their day to day.

Many training programs are ineffective because they offer the wrong content, deliver it in a way that is not memorable, and are not aligned with the IT department’s business objectives.

Blueprint: Manage Poor Performance While Working From Home

Assess and improve remote work performance with our ready-to-use tools.

Works Cited

April, Richard. “10 KPIs Every Sales Manager Should Measure in 2019.” HubSpot, 24 June 2019. Web.

Banerjea, Peter. “5 Powerful Strategies for Managing a Remote Sales Team.” Badger - Maps for field sales, n.d. Web.

Bibby, Adrianne. “5 Employers’ Awesome Quotes about Work Flexibility.” FlexJobs, 9 January 2017. Web.

Brogie, Frank. “The 14 KPIs every field sales rep should strive to improve.” Repsly, 2018. Web.

Dunn, Julie. “5 smart tips for leading field sales teams.” LevelEleven, March 2015. Web.

Edinger, Scott. “How great sales leaders coach.” Forbes, 2013. Web.

“Employee Outlook: Employee Views on Working Life.” CIPD, April 2016. Web.

Hall, Becki. “The 5 biggest challenges facing remote workers (and how to solve them).” interact, 7 July 2017. Web.

Hofstede, Geert. “National Cultural Dimensions.” Hofstede Insights, 2012. Web.

“Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2014 (EPA 430-R-16-002).” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 15 April 2016.

“Latest Telecommuting Statistics.” Global Workplace Analytics, June 2021. Web.

Knight, Rebecca. “How to manage remote direct reports.” Harvard Business Review, 2015. Web.

“Rewards and Recognition: 5 ways to show remote worker appreciation.” FurstPerson, 2019. Web.

Palay, Jonathan. "How to build your sales management cadence." CommercialTribe, 22 March 2018. Web.

“Sales Activity Management Matrix.” Asian Sales Guru, 2019. Web.

Smith, Simone. “9 Things to Consider When Recognizing Remote Employees.” hppy, 2018. Web.

“State of Remote Work 2017.” OWL Labs, 2021. Web.

“State of the American Workplace.” Gallup, 2017. Web.

“Telework Savings Potential.” Global Workplace Analytics, June 2021. Web.

“The Future of Jobs Employment Trends.” World Economic Forum, 2016. Web.

“The other COVID-19 crisis: Mental health.” Qualtrics, 14 April 2020. Web.

Thompson, Dan. “The straightforward truth about effective sales leadership.” Sales Hacker, 2017. Web.

Tsipursky, Gleb. “Remote Work Can Be Better for Innovation Than In-Person Meetings.” Scientific American, 14 Oct. 2021. Web.

Walsh, Kim. “New sales manager? Follow this guide to crush your first quarter.” HubSpot, May 2019. Web.

“What Leaders Need to Know about Remote Workers: Surprising Differences in Workplace Happiness and Relationships.” TINYpulse, 2016.

Zenger, Jack, and Joe Folkman. “Feedback: The Leadership Conundrum.” Talent Quarterly: The Feedback Issue, 2015.

Contributors

Anonymous CAMH Employee

Infrastructure &Operations Priorities 2023

Navigate the liminal space between threats and opportunities.

2023: A liminal space between threats and opportunities

Introduction

Welcome to the Info-Tech 2023 I&O Priorities Report

Infrastructure & Operations priorities

The I&O priorities were determined by combining I&O member responses from the Tech Trends and Priorities 2023 survey with insightful signals from secondary research, economic markets, regulatory bodies, industry organizations, and vendors.

I&O Priorities 2023

I&O priorities framework

Challenge: Expand the I&O border

The hidden message in this report is that I&O priorities extend beyond the traditional scope of I&O functions. I&O members need to collaborate across functional areas to successfully address the priorities presented in this report. Info-Tech can help! Align your priorities with our material on how to Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy. Use a modified version of the Strategy Initiative Template (next slide) to convey your strong opinion on the priorities you need your stakeholders to know about. And do so in a way that is familiar so they will easily understand.

Info-Tech 2023 Trends Survey Results

Call your Executive Advisor or Counselor to help identify the one or two key messages you want to bring forward for success in 2023!

Info-Tech IT Strategy Initiative Template, from the IT Strategy Presentation Template & Priorities Report Initiative Template .

Protect from threats

Get out of your silo. Forget your job description and just start doing what needs to be done.

Enhance I&O Cybersecurity

Produce ESG Reporting

Recession Readiness

Enhance cybersecurity response

SIGNALS

Enhance cybersecurity response

SIGNALS

Enhance cybersecurity response

SIGNALS

Enhance cybersecurity response

CALL TO ACTION

Get out of your I&O silo and form cross-functional cybersecurity teams.

I&O priority actions

Establish a cross-functional security steering committee to coordinate security processes and technologies. The complexity of managing security across modern applications, cloud, IoT, and network infrastructure that members operate is greater than ever before and requires coordinated teamwork.

Contain the cyber threat with zero trust (ZT) architecture. Extend ZT to network and critical infrastructure to limit exposure.

Leverage AI to build vigilant security intelligence. Smart I&O operators will make use of AI automation to augment their security technologies to help detect threats and contain security incidents on critical infrastructure.

Enhance cybersecurity response

I&O priority actions

Build specialized cybersecurity incident management protocols with your service desk. Build integrated security focused teams within service desk operations that continually test and improve security incident response protocols internally and with specialized security vendors. In some organizations, security incident response teams extend beyond traditional infrastructure into social media. Work cross-functionally to determine the risk exposure to misinformation and incident response procedures.

Treat lost or stolen equipment as a security incident. Develop hardware asset management protocols for tracking and reporting on these incidents and keep a record of equipment disposal. Implement tools that allow for remote deletion of data and report on lost or stolen equipment.

Produce ESG reporting

SIGNALS

Produce ESG reporting

SIGNALS

ESG mandates are being rolled out globally.

ESG reporting has greatly expanded since a 2017 report by Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD, 2017) which recommended that organizations disclose climate-related financial metrics for investors to appropriately price climate-related risks to share price. In 2021, the Swiss Finance Institute research paper (Sautner, 2021) identified 29 countries that require ESG reporting, primarily for larger public companies, financial institutions, and state-owned corporations.

Global ESG mandates

29 nations with ESG mandates identified by the Swiss Finance Institute

Produce ESG reporting

SIGNALS

Produce ESG reporting

CALL TO ACTION

Being unprepared for new ESG reporting mandates without a clear and validated ESG reporting process puts your organization at risk.

I&O priority actions

Understand ESG risk exposure. Define the gap between what ESG reporting is required in your jurisdiction and current reporting capabilities to meet them. Build the I&O role with responsibility for ESG reporting.

Include vendors in ESG reporting. Review infrastructure facilities with landlords, utilities, and hosting providers to see if they can provide ESG reporting on sustainable power generation, then map it to I&O power consumption as part of their contractual obligations. Ask equipment vendors to provide ESG reporting on manufacturing materials and energy consumption to boot-strap data collection.

Implement a HAM process to track asset disposal and other types of e-waste. Update agreements with disposal vendors to get reporting on waste and recycle volumes.

Produce ESG reporting

I&O priority actions

Implement an ESG reporting framework. There are five major ESG reporting frameworks being used globally. Select one of the frameworks below that makes sense for your organization, and implement it.

ISO 14001 Environmental Management: Part of the ISO Technical Committee family of standards that allows your organization to understand its legal requirements to become certified in ESG.

Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Standards: GRI has been developing ESG reporting standards since 1997. GRI provides a modular ESG framework applicable to all sizes and sectors of organizations worldwide.

Principles for Responsible Investment: UN-developed framework for ESG reporting framework for disclosure in responsible investments.

Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB): ESG report framework to be used by investors.

UN Global Compact: ESG reporting framework based on 10 principles that organizations can voluntarily contribute data to.

Implement a HAM process to track asset disposal and other types of e-waste. Update agreements with disposal vendors to get reports on waste and recycle volumes.

Recession readiness

SIGNALS

Recession readiness

SIGNALS

Recession readiness

SIGNALS

Tough choices on budgetary spends.

The responses indicated that I&O members expect decreased reinvestment for 2023 for the following:

• API programming (-21.7%)
• Cloud computing (-19.4%)
• 44% of I&O members indicated if 2023 requires costs cutting, 5-20% of their cloud computing investment will be at risk of the chopping block!
• Workforce management (-9.4%)
• No-code /low-code infrastructure (-5.3%)

Make sure you can clearly measure the value of all budgeted I&O activities.

Anything that can't demonstrate clear value to leadership is potentially on the chopping block.

Recession readiness

CALL TO ACTION

Get ahead of inflationary pressures with early budgetary planning, and identify the gap between the catch-up projects and required critical net new investments.

II&O priority actions

Hedge against inflation on infrastructure projects. Develop and communicate value-based strategies to lock in pricing and mitigate inflationary risk with vendors.

Communicate value-add on all I&O budgeted items. Define an infrastructure roadmap to highlight which projects are technical debt and which are new strategic investments, and note their value to the organization.

Look for cost saving technologies. Focus on I&O projects that automate services to increase productivity and optimize head count.

Realize opportunities

Build on a record of COVID-related innovation success and position the enterprise to take advantage of 2023.

AI governance: Watching the watchers

Data stewardship: Cornerstone of value

Prep for a brave new metaverse

AI governance: Watching the watchers

SIGNALS

AI governance: Watching the watchers

SIGNALS

AI governance: Watching the watchers

CALL TO ACTION

Establish I&O within an AI governance program to build trust in AI results and behaviors and limit legal exposure.

I&O priority actions

Define who has overall AI accountability for AI governance within I&O. This role is responsible for establishing strategic governance metrics over AI use and results, and identifying liability risks.

Maintain an inventory of AI use. Conduct an audit of where AI is used within I&O, and identify gaps in documentation and alignment with I&O processes and organizational values.

Define an I&O success map. Provide transparency of AI use by generating pseudo code of AI models, and scorecard AI decision making with expected predictions and behavioral actions taken.

AI governance: Watching the watchers

Manage bias in AI decision making. Work with AI technology vendors to identify how unethical bias can enter the results, using operational data sets for validation prior to rollout.

Protect AI data sets from manipulation. Generate new secure storage for AI technology audit trails on AI design making and results. Work with your security team to ensure data sets used by AI for training can’t be corrupted.

Data governance: Cornerstone of value

SIGNALS

Data governance: Cornerstone of value

SIGNALS

Approach to data analysis is primarily done in-house.

85% of surveyed I&O members are doing data analysis with custom-made or external tools. Interestingly, 10% of I&O members do not conduct any data analysis.

Members are missing a formal data governance process.

81% of surveyed I&O members do not have a formal or automated process for data governance. Ironically, 24% of members responded that they aim to have publicly accessible data-as-a-service or information repositories.

Despite investment in data initiatives, organizations carry high levels of data debt.

Info-Tech research, Establish Data Governance, points out that data debt, the accumulated cost associated with sub-optimal governance of data assets, is a problem for 78% of organizations.

What the enterprise expects out of enterprise storage is much more complicated in 2023.

Data protection and governance are non-negotiable aspects of enterprise storage, even when it’s unstructured.

Data governance: Cornerstone of value

SIGNALS

Data governance: Cornerstone of value

CALL TO ACTION

Develop a data governance program that includes an I&O data steward for oversight.

I&O priority actions

Establish an I&O data steward. Make data governance by establishing a data steward role with accountability for governance. The steward works collaboratively with DataOPs to control access to I&O data, enforce policies, and reduce the time to make use of the data.

Define a comprehensive storage architecture. If you thought you had a data sprawl problem before, wait until you see the volume of data generated from IoT and Web 3.0 applications. Get ahead of the problem by creating an infrastructure roadmap for structured and unstructured data storage.

Build a solid backbone for AI Operations using data quality best practices. Data quality is the foundation for generation of operational value from the data and artificial intelligence efforts. Focus on using a methodology to build a culture of data quality within I&O systems and applications that generate data rather than reactive fixes.

Look to partner with third-party vendors for your master data management (MDM) efforts. Modern MDM vendors can work with your existing data fabrics/lake and help leverage your data governance policies into the cloud.

Prep for a brave new metaverse

SIGNALS

From science fiction to science fact.

The term metaverse was coined in 1992 by Neal Stephenson and is a common theme in science fiction. For most I&O surveyed professionals, the term metaverse conjures up more confusion than clarity, as it’s not one place, but multiple metaverse worlds. The primordial metaverse was focused on multiplayer gaming and some educational experiences. It wasn’t until recently that it gained a critical mass in the fashion and entertainment industries with the use of non-fungible tokens (NFT). The pandemic created a unique opportunity for metaverse-related technologies to expand Web 3.0.

Related Info-Tech Research

• Into the Metaverse
• Establish a Foresight Capability
• Double Your Organization’s Effectiveness With a Digital Twin
• Adopt Blockchain for Supply Chain Transparency

Prep for a brave new metaverse

SIGNALS

Collaboration and beyond.

On one hand, metaverse technologies virtual reality(VR)/augmented reality (AR) headsets can be a method of collaborating internally within a single organization. About 10% of our surveyed I&O members engaged this type of collaborative metaverse in 2022, with another 24% looking to run proof of concept projects in 2023. However, there is a much larger terrain for metaverse projects outside of workforce collaboration, which 17% of surveyed I&O members are planning to engage with in 2023.

These are sophisticated new metaverse worlds, and digital twins of production environments are being created for B2B collaboration, operations, engineering, healthcare, architecture, and education that include the use of block chain, NFTs, smart contracts, and other Web 3.0 technologies

“They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse.”

Neal Stephenson,
Snow Crash 1992

Prep for a brave new metaverse

SIGNALS

Metaverse requires multidimensional security.

Security in the context of the metaverse presents new challenges to I&O. The infrastructure that runs the metaverse is still vulnerable to “traditional” security threats. New attack vectors include financial and identity fraud, privacy and data loss, along with new cyber-physical threats which are predicted to occur as the metaverse begins to integrate with IoT and other 3D objects in the physical world.

The ultimate in "not a product" – the metaverse promises to be a hodgepodge of badly standardized technologies for the near future.

Be prepared to take care of pets and not cattle for the foreseeable future, but keep putting the fencing around the ranch.

Prep for a brave new metaverse

SIGNALS

Prep for a brave new metaverse

CALL TO ACTION

Ready or not, the metaverse is coming to an infrastructure near you. Start expanding I&O technologies and processes to support a metaverse infrastructure.

I&O priority actions

Develop a plan for network upgrades.

A truly immersive VR/AR experience requires very low latency. Identify gaps and develop a plan to enhance your network infrastructure surrounding your metaverse space(s) and end users.

Extend security posture into the metaverse.

Securing the infrastructure that runs your metaverse is going to extend the end-user equipment used to navigate it. More importantly, security policies need to encompass the avatars that navigate it and the spatial web that they interact with, which can include physical world items like IoT.

Prep for a brave new metaverse

I&O priority actions

Metaverse theft prevention

Leverage existing strategies to identify management in the metaverse. Privacy policies need to extend their focus to data loss prevention within the metaverse.

Collaborate

The skill set required to build, deploy, manage, and support the metaverse is complex. Develop a metaverse support organization that extends beyond I&O functions into security, DevOps, and end-user experiences.

Educate

Web 3.0 technologies and business models are complex. Education of I&O technical- and commerce-focused team members is going to help prevent you from getting blindsided. Seek out specialized training programs for technical staff and strategic education for executives, like the Wharton School of Business certification program.

Authors

John Annand Principal Research Director	Theo Antoniadis Principal Research Director	Contributors Paul Sparks, CTO at Brookshire Grocery Company 2 Anonymous Contributors
Figuring out the true nature of the “Turbo” button of his 486DX100 launched John on a 20-year career in managed services and solution architecture, exploring the secrets of HPC, virtualization, and DIY WANs built with banks of USR TotalControl modems. Today he focuses his research and advisory on software-defined infrastructure technologies, strategy, organization, and service design in an increasingly Agile and DevOps world.	Theo has decades of operational and project management experience with start-ups and multinationals across North America and Europe. He has held various consulting, IT management and operations leadership positions within telecommunications, SaaS, and software companies.

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Hernandez, Roberto, et al. “Demystifying the metaverse." PWC. Accessed August 2022.
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Applications Priorities 2023

Applications are the engine of the business: keep them relevant and modern

What we are facing today is transforming the ways in which we work, live, and relate to one another. Applications teams and portfolios MUST change to meet this reality.

Economic, social, and regulatory conditions have changed livelihoods, businesses, and marketplaces. Modern tools and technologies have acted as lifelines by minimizing operating and delivery costs, and in the process, establishing a strong foundation for growth and maturity.

As organizations continue to strengthen business continuity, disaster recovery, and system resilience, activities to simply "keep the lights on" are not enough. Be pragmatic in the prioritization and planning of your applications initiatives, and use your technologies as a foundation for your growth.

Your applications must meet the top business goals of your CXOs

• Ensure service continuity
• Improve customer experience
• Make data-driven decisions
• Maximize stakeholder value
• Manage risk

Source: CEO-CIO Alignment Diagnostics, August 2021 to July 2022, n=568.

Select and align your applications priorities to your business goals and objectives

Applications are critical components in any business strategic plan. They can directly influence an organization's internal and external brand and reputation, such as their:

• Uniqueness, competitiveness, and innovativeness in the industry.
• Ability to be dynamic, flexible, and responsive to changing expectations, business conditions, and technologies.

Therefore, business leaders are continuously looking for innovative ways to better position their application portfolios to satisfy their goals and objectives, i.e. applications priorities. Given the scope and costs often involved, these priorities must be carefully crafted to clearly state achievable business outcomes that satisfy
the different needs of very different customers, stakeholders, and users.

Today's business applications are good but leave room for improvement

72%
Average business application satisfaction score among IT leadership in 1582 organizations.

Source: CIO Business Vision, August 2021 to July 2022, N=190.

Five Applications Priorities for 2023

In this report, we explore five priorities for emerging and leading-edge technologies and practices that can improve on capabilities needed to meet the Ambitions of your organization.

Strengthen your foundations to better support your applications priorities

These key capabilities are imperative to the success of your applications strategy.

KPI and Metrics

Easily attainable and insightful measurements to gauge the progress of meeting strategic objectives and goals (KPIs), and the performance of individual teams, practices and processes (metrics).

BUSINESS ALIGNMENT

Gain an accurate understanding and interpretation of stakeholder, end-user, and customer expectations and priorities. These define the success of business products and services considering the priorities of individual business units and teams.

EFFICIENT DELIVERY & SUPPORT PRACTICE

Software delivery and support roles, processes, and tools are collaborative, well equipped and resourced, and optimized to meet changing stakeholder expectations.

Data Management & Governance

Ensuring data is continuously reliable and trustworthy. Data structure and integrations are defined, governed, and monitored.

Product & Service Ownership

Complete inventory and rationalization of the product and service portfolio, prioritized backlogs, roadmaps, and clear product and service ownership with good governance. This helps ensure this portfolio is optimized to meet its goals and objectives.

Strengthen your foundations to better support your applications priorities (cont'd)

These key capabilities are imperative to the success of your applications strategy.

Organizational Change Management

Manage the adoption of new and modified processes and technologies considering reputational, human, and operational concerns.

IT Operational Management

Continuous monitoring and upkeep of products and services to assure business continuity, and system reliability, robustness and disaster recovery.

Architectural Framework

A set of principles and standards that guides the consistent, sustainable and scalable growth of enterprise technologies. Changes to the architecture are made in collaboration with affected parties, such as security and infrastructure.

Application Security

The measures, controls, and tactics at the application layer that prevent vulnerabilities against external and internal threats and ensure compliance to industry and regulatory security frameworks and standards.

There are many factors that can stand in your team's way

Expectations on your applications team have increased, while the gap between how stakeholders and applications teams perceive effectiveness remains wide. This points to a need to clarify the requirements to deliver valuable and quality applications and address the pressures challenging your teams.

1. Attracting and retaining talent
2. Maximizing the return on technology
3. Confidently shifting to digital
4. Addressing competing priorities
5. Fostering a collaborative culture
6. Creating high-throughput teams

CIOs agree that at least some improvement is needed across key IT activities

Source: CEO-CIO Alignment Diagnostics, August 2021 to July 2022, n=568.

Pressure Point 1:
Attracting and Retaining Talent

Recent environmental pressures impacted traditional working arrangements and showed more workplace flexibility is often possible. At the same time, many employees' expectations about how, when, and where they choose to work have also evolved. Recruitment and retention are reflections of different sides of the same employee value proposition coin. Organizations that fail to reinvent their approach to attracting and retaining talent by focusing on candidate and employee experience risk turnover, vacancies, and lost opportunities that can negatively impact the bottom line.

Address the underlying challenges

• Lack of employee empowerment and few opportunities for learning and development.
• Poor coworker and manager relationships.
• Compensation and benefits are inadequate to maintain desired quality of life.
• Unproductive work environment and conflicting balance of work and life.
• Unsatisfactory employee experience, including lack of employee recognition
  and transparency of organizational change.

While workplace flexibility comes with many benefits, longer work hours jeopardize wellbeing.
62% of organizations reported increased working hours, while 80% reported an increase in flexibility.
Source: McLean & Company, 2022; n=394.

Be strategic in how you fill and train key IT skills and capabilities

• Cybersecurity
• Big Data/Analytics
• Technical Architecture
• DevOps
• Development
• Cloud

Source: Harvey Nash Group, 2021; n=2120.

Pressure Point 2:
Maximizing the Return of Technology

Recent environmental pressures impacted traditional working arrangements and showed more workplace flexibility is often possible. At the same time, many employees' expectations about how, when, and where they choose to work have also evolved. Recruitment and retention are reflections of different sides of the same employee value proposition coin. Organizations that fail to reinvent their approach to attracting and retaining talent by focusing on candidate and employee experience risk turnover, vacancies, and lost opportunities that can negatively impact the bottom line.

Address the underlying challenges

• Inability to analyze, propose, justify, and communicate modernization solutions in language the stakeholders understand and in a way that shows they clearly support business priorities and KPIs and mitigate risks.
• Little interest in documenting and rationalizing products and services through business-IT collaboration.
• Lack of internal knowledge of the system and loss of vendor support.
• Undefined, siloed product and service ownership and governance, preventing solutions from working together to collectively deliver more value.
• Little stakeholder appetite to invest in activities beyond "keeping the lights on."

Only 64% of applications were identified as effective by end users.
Effective applications are identified as at least highly important and have high feature and usability satisfaction.
Source: Application Portfolio Assessment, August 2021 to July 2022; N=315.

"Regardless of the many definitions of modernization floating around, the one characteristic that we should be striving for is to ensure our applications do an outstanding job of supporting the users and the business in the most effective and efficient manner possible."
Source: looksoftware.

Pressure Point 3:
Confidently Shifting to Digital

"Going digital" reshapes how the business operates and drives value by optimizing how digital and traditional technologies and tactics work together. This shift often presents significant business and technical risks to business processes, enterprise data, applications, and systems which stakeholders and teams are not aware of or prepared to accommodate.

Address the underlying challenges

• Differing perspectives on digital can lead to disjointed transformation initiatives, oversold benefits, and a lack of synergy among digital technologies and processes.
• Organizations have difficulty adapting to new technologies or rethinking current business models, processes, and ways of working because of the potential human, ethical, and reputational impacts and restrictions from legacy systems.
• Management lacks a framework to evaluate how their organization manages and governs business value delivery.
• IT is not equipped or resourced to address these rapidly changing business, customer, and technology needs.
• The wrong tools and technologies were chosen to support the shift to digital.

The shift to digital processes is starting, but slowly.
62% of respondents indicated that 1-20% of their processes were digitized during the past year.
Source: Tech Trends and Priorities 2023; N=500

Resistance to change and time/budget constraints are top barriers preventing companies from modernizing their applications.
Source: Konveyor, 2022; n=600.

Pressure Point 4:
Addressing Competing Priorities

Enterprise products and services are not used, operated, or branded in isolation. The various parties involved may have competing priorities, which often leads to disagreements on when certain business and technology changes should be made and how resources, budget, and other assets should be allocated. Without a broader product vision, portfolio vision, and roadmap, the various dependent or related products and services will not deliver the same level of value as if they were managed collectively.

Address the underlying challenges

• Undefined product and service ownership and governance, including escalation procedures when consensus cannot be reached.
• Lack of a unified and grounded set of value and quality definitions, guiding principles, prioritization standards, and broad visibility across portfolios, business capabilities, and business functions.
• Distrust between business units and IT teams, which leads to the scaling of unmanaged applications and fragmented changes and projects.
• Decisions are based on opinions and experiences without supporting data.

55% of CXOs stated some improvement is necessary in activities to understand business goals.
Source: CEO-CIO Alignment Diagnostics, August 2021 to July 2022; n=568.

CXOs are moderately satisfied with IT's performance as a business partner (average score of 69% among all CXOs). This sentiment is similarly felt among CIOs (64%).
Source: CEO-CIO Alignment Diagnostics, August 2021 to July 2022; n=568.

Pressure Point 5:
Fostering a Collaborative Culture

Culture impacts business results, including bottom-line revenue and productivity metrics. Leaders appreciate the impact culture can have on applications initiatives and wish to leverage this. How culture translates from an abstract concept to something that is measurable and actionable is not straightforward. Executives need to clarify how the desired culture will help achieve their applications strategy and need to focus on the items that will have the most impact.

Address the underlying challenges

• Broad changes do not consider the unique subcultures, personalities, and behaviors of the various teams and individuals in the organization.
• Leaders mandate cultural changes without alleviating critical barriers and do not embody the principles of the target state.
• Bureaucracy and politics restrict changes and encourage the status quo.
• Industry standards, technologies, and frameworks do not support or cannot be tailored to fit the desired culture.
• Some teams are deliberately excluded from the scoping, planning, and execution of key product and service delivery and management activities.

Agile does not solve team culture challenges.
43% of organizations cited organizational culture as a significant barrier to adopting and scaling Agile practices.
Source: Digital.ai, 2021.

"Providing a great employee experience" as the second priority (after recruiting) highlights the emphasis organizations are placing on helping employees adjust after having been forced to change the way work gets done.
Source: McLean & Company, 2022; N=826.

Use your applications priorities to help address your pressure points

Success can be dependent on your ability to navigate around or alleviate your pressure points. Design and market your applications priorities to bring attention to your pressure points and position them as key risk factors to their success.

Digital Experience (DX)

PRIORITY 1

• Deliver Valuable User, Customer, Employee, and Brand Experiences

Delivering valuable digital experiences requires the adoption of good management, governance, and operational practices to accommodate stakeholder, employee, customer, and end-user expectations of digital experiences (e.g. product management, automation, and iterative delivery). Technologies are chosen based on what best enables, delivers, and supports these expectations.

Introduction

Digital transformation is not just about new tools and technologies. It is also about delivering a valuable digital experience

What is digital experience (DX)?

Digital experience (DX) refers to the interaction between a user and an organization through digital products and services. Digital products and services are tools, systems, devices, and resources that gather, store, and process data; are continuously modernized; and embody eight key attributes that are described on the following slide. DX is broken down into four distinct perspectives*:

• Customer Experience – The immediate perceptions of transactions and interactions experienced through a customer's journey in the use of the organization's digital
  products and services.
• End-User Experience – Users' emotions, beliefs, and physical and psychological responses
  that occur before, during, or after interacting with a digital product or service.
• Brand Experience – The broader perceptions, emotions, thoughts, feelings and actions the public associate with the organization's brand and reputation or its products and services. Brand experience evolves over time as customers continuously engage with the brand.
• Employee Experience – The satisfaction and experience of an employee through their journey with the organization, from recruitment and hiring to their departure. How an employee embodies and promotes the organization brand and culture can affect their performance, trust, respect, and drive to innovate and optimize.

Digital products and services have a common set of attributes

Digital transformation is not just about new tools and technologies. It is also about delivering a valuable digital experience

• Digital products and services must keep pace with changing business and end-user needs as well as tightly supporting your maturing business model with continuous modernization. Focus your continuous modernization on the key characteristics that drive business value.
• Fit for purpose: Functionalities are designed and implemented for the purpose of satisfying the end user's needs and solving their problems.
• User-centric: End users see the product as rewarding, engaging, intuitive, and emotionally satisfying. They want to come back to it.
• Adaptable: The product can be quickly tailored to meet changing end-user and technology needs with reusable and customizable components.
• Accessible: The product is available on demand and on the end user's preferred interface.
  End users have a seamless experience across all devices.
• Private and secured: The end user's activity and data are protected from unauthorized access.
• Informative and insightful: The product delivers consumable, accurate, and trustworthy real-time data that is important to the end user.
• Seamless application connection: The product facilitates direct interactions with one or more other products through an uninterrupted user experience.
• Relationship and network building: The product enables and promotes the connection and interaction of people.

Signals

DX is critical for business growth and maturity, but the organization may not be ready

A good DX has become a key differentiator that gives organizations an advantage over their competition and peers. Shifts in working environments; employee, customer, and stakeholder expectations; and the advancements in modern technologies have raised the importance of adopting and transitioning to digital processes and tools to stay relevant and responsive to changing business and technology conditions.

Applications teams are critical to ensuring the successful delivery and operation of these digital processes and tools. However, they are often under-resourced and challenged to meet their DX goals.

• 7% of both business and IT respondents think IT has the resources needed to keep up with digital transformation initiatives and meet deadlines (Cyara, 2021).
• 43% of respondents said that the core barrier to digital transformation is a lack of skilled resources (Creatio, 2021).

	of organizations stated that at least 1% of processes were shifted from being manually completed to digitally completed in the last year. 29% of organizations stated at least 21% were shifted. Source: Tech Trends and Priorities 2023; N=500.
	of organizations recognized digital transformation is important for competitive advantage. 94% stated it is important to enhance customer experience, and 91% stated it will have a positive impact on revenue. Source: Cyara, 2021.

Drivers

Brand and reputation

Customers are swayed by the innovations and advancements in digital technologies and expect your applications team to deliver and support them. Your leaders recognize the importance of these expectations and are integrating them into their business strategy and brand (how the organization presents itself to its customers, employees and the public). They hope that their actions will improve and shape the company's reputation (public perception of the company) as effective, customer-focused, and forward-thinking.

Worker productivity

As you evolve and adopt more complex tools and technology, your stakeholders will expect more from business units and IT teams. Unfortunately, teams employing manual processes and legacy systems will struggle to meet these expectations. Digital products and services promote the simplification of complex operations and applications and help the business and your teams better align operational practices with strategic goals and deliver valuable DX.

Organization modernization

Legacy processes, systems, and ways of working are no longer suitable for meeting the strategic digital objectives and DX needs stakeholders expect. They drive up operational costs without increased benefits, impede business growth and innovation, and consume scarce budgets that could be used for other priorities. Shifting to digital tools and technologies will bring these challenges to light and demonstrate how modernization is an integral part of DX success.

Benefits & Risks

Benefits

• Flexibility & Satisfaction
• Adoption
• Reliability

Employees and customers can choose how they want to access, modify, and consume digital products and services. They can be tailored to meet the specific functional needs, behaviors, and habits of the end user.

The customer, end user, brand, and employee drive selection, design, and delivery of digital products and services. Even the most advanced technologies will fail if key roles do not see the value in their use.

Digital products and services are delivered with technical quality built into them, ensuring they meet the industry, regulatory, and company standards throughout their lifespan and in various conditions.

Risks

• Legacy & Lore
• Bureaucracy & Politics
• Process Inefficiencies
• No Quality Standards

Some stakeholders may not be willing to change due to their familiarity and comfort of business practices.

Competing and conflicting priorities of strategic products and services undermine digital transformation and broader modernization efforts.

Business processes are often burdened by wasteful activities. Digital products and services are only as valuable as the processes they support.

The performance and support of your digital products and services are hampered due to unmanageable technical debt because of a deliberate decision to bypass or omit quality good practices.

Address your pressure points to fully realize the benefits of this priority

Success can be dependent on your ability to address your pressure points.

Recommendations

Build a digital business strategy

A digital business strategy clearly articulates the goals and ambitions of the business to adopt digital practices, tools, and technologies. This document:

• Looks for ways to transform the business by identifying what technologies to embrace, what processes to automate, and what new business models to create.
• Unifies digital possibilities with your customer experiences.
• Establishes accountability with the executive leadership.
• States the importance of cross-functional participation from senior management across the organization.

Related Research:

• Define Your Digital Business Strategy

Learn, understand, and empathize with your users, employees, and customers

• To create a better product, solution, or service, understanding those who use it, their needs, and their context is critical.
• A great experience design practice can help you balance those goals so that they are in harmony with those of your users.
• IT leaders must find ways to understand the needs of the business and develop empathy on a much deeper level. This empathy is the foundation for a thriving business partnership.

Related Research:

• Apply Design Thinking to Build Empathy With the Business
• Implement and Mature Your User Experience Design Practice

Recommendations

Center product and service delivery decisions and activities on DX and quality

User, customer, employee, and brand are integral perspectives on the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and the management and governance practices supporting digital products and services. It ensures quality standards and controls are consistently upheld while maintaining alignment with various needs and priorities. The goal is to come to a consensus on a universal definition and approach to embed quality and DX-thinking throughout the delivery process.

Related Research:

• Modernize Your SDLC
• Make the Case for Product Delivery
• Build a Software Quality Assurance Program

Instill collaborative delivery practices

Today's rapidly scaling and increasingly complex digital products and services create mounting pressure on delivery teams to release new features and changes quickly and with sufficient quality. This pressure is further compounded by the competing priorities of individual stakeholders and the nuances among different personas of digital products and services.

A collaborative delivery practice sets the activities, channels, and relationships needed to deliver a valuable and quality product or service with cross-functional awareness, accountability, and agreement.

Related Research:

• Implement Agile Practices That Work
• Implement DevOps Practices That Work
• Build Your BizDevOps Playbook

Recommendations

Continuously monitor and modernize your digital products and services

Today's modern digital products and services are tomorrow's shelfware. They gradually lose their value, and the supporting technologies will become obsolete. Modernization is a continuous need.

Data-driven insights help decision makers decide which products and services to retire, upgrade, retrain on, or maintain to meet the demands of the business.

Enhancements focusing on critical business capabilities strengthen the case for investment and build trust with all stakeholders.

Related Research:

• Application Portfolio Assessment: End User Feedback
• Application Portfolio Management Foundations
• Modernize Your Applications

CASE STUDY
Mastercard in Asia

Focus on the customer journey

Chief Marketing Officer M.V. Rajamannar (Raja) wanted to change Mastercard's iconic "Priceless" ad campaign (with the slogan "There are some things money can't buy. For everything else there's Mastercard."). The main reasons were that the campaign relied on one-way communication and targeted end customers, even though Mastercard doesn't issue cards directly to customers; partner banks do. To drive the change in campaign, Raja and his team created a digital engine that leveraged digital and social media. Digital engine is a seven-step process based on insights gleaned from data and real-time optimization.

1. Emotional spark: Using data to understand customers' passion points, Mastercard builds videos and creatives to ignite an emotional spark and give customers a reason to engage. For example, weeks before New Year's Eve, Mastercard produced a video with Hugh Jackman to encourage customers to submit a story about someone who deeply mattered to them. The authors of the winning story would be flown to reunite with those both distant and dear.
2. Engagement: Mastercard targets the right audience with a spark video through social media to encourage customers to share their stories.
3. Offers: To help its partner banks and merchants in driving their business, the company identifies the best offers to match consumers' interests. In the above campaign, Mastercard's Asia-Pacific team found that Singapore was a favorite destination for Indian customers, so they partnered with Singapore's Resorts World Sentosa with an attractive offer.
4. Real-time optimization: Mastercard optimizes, in real time, a portfolio of several offers through A/B testing and other analysis.
5. Amplification: Real-time testing provides confidence to Mastercard about the potential success of these offers and encourages its bank and merchant partners to co-market and co-fund these campaigns.
6. Network effects: A few weeks after consumers submitted their stories about distant loved ones, Mastercard selected winners, produced videos of them surprising their friends and families, and used these videos in social media to encourage sharing.
7. Incremental transactions: These programs translate into incremental business for banks who issue cards, for merchants where customers spend money, and for Mastercard, which gets a portion of every transaction.

Source: Harvard Business Review Press

CASE STUDY
Mastercard in Asia (cont'd)

Focus on the customer journey

1. Emotional Spark
   Drives genuine personal stories
2. Engagement
   Through Facebook
   and social media
3. Offers
   From merchants
   and Mastercard assets
4. Optimization
   Real-time testing of offers and themes
5. Amplification
   Paid and organic programmatic buying
6. Network Effects
   Sharing and
   mass engagement
7. Incremental Transactions
   Win-win for all parties

CASE STUDY
Mastercard in Asia (cont'd)

The Mastercard case highlights important lessons on how to engage customers:

• Have a broad message. Brands need to connect with consumers over how they live and spend their time. Organizations need to go beyond the brand or product message to become more relevant to consumers' lives. Dove soap was very successful in creating a conversation among consumers with its "Real Beauty" campaign, which focused not on the brand or even the product category, but on how women and society view beauty.
• Shift from storytelling to story making. To break through the clutter of advertising, companies need to move from storytelling to story making. A broader message that is emotionally engaging allows for a two-way conversation.
• Be consistent with the brand value. The brand needs to stand for something, and the content should be relevant to and consistent with the image of the brand. Pepsi announced an award of $20 million in grants to individuals, businesses, and nonprofits that promote a new idea to make a positive impact on community. A large number of submissions were about social causes that had nothing to do with Pepsi, and some, like reducing obesity, were in conflict with Pepsi's product.
• Create engagement that drives business. Too much entertainment in ads may engage customers but detract from both communicating the brand message and increasing sales. Simply measuring the number of video views provides only a partial picture of a program's success.

Intelligent Automation

PRIORITY 2

• Extend Automation Practices with AI and ML

AI and ML are rapidly growing. Organizations see the value of machines intelligently executing high-performance and dynamic tasks such as driving cars and detecting fraud. Senior leaders see AI and ML as opportunities to extend their business process automation investments.

Introduction

Intelligent automation is the next step in your business process automation journey

What is intelligent automation (IA)?

Intelligent automation (IA) is the combination of traditional automation technologies, such as business process management (BPM) and robotic process automation (RPA), with AI and ML. The goal is to further streamline and scale decision making across various business processes by:

• Removing human interactions.
• Addressing decisions that involve complex variables.
• Automatically adapting processes to changing conditions.
• Bridging disparate automation technologies into an integrated end-to-end value delivery pipeline.

"For IA to succeed, employees must be involved in the transformation journey so they can experience firsthand the benefits of a new way of working and creating business value," (Cognizant).

What is the difference between IA and hyperautomation?

"Hyperautomation is the act of automating everything in an organization that can be automated. The intent is to streamline processes across an organization using intelligent automation, which includes AI, RPA and other technologies, to run without human intervention. … Hyperautomation is a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible" (IBM, 2021).

Note that hyperautomation often enables IA, but teams solely adopting IA do not need to abide to its automation-first principles.

IA is a combination of various tools and technologies

What tools and technologies are involved in IA?

• Artificial intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) – AI systems perform tasks mimicking human intelligence such as learning from experience and problem solving. AI is making its own decisions without human intervention. Machine learning systems learn from experience and without explicit instructions. They learn patterns from data then analyze and make predictions based on past behavior and the patterns learned. AI is a combination of technologies and can include machine learning.
• Intelligent Business Process Management System (iBPMS) – Combination of BPM tools with AI and other intelligence capabilities.
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – Robots leveraging an application's UI rather than programmatic access. Automate rules-based, repetitive tasks performed by human workers with AI/ML.
• Process Mining & Discovery – Process mining involves reading system event logs and application transactions and applying algorithmic analysis to automatically identify and map inferred business processes. Process discovery involves unintrusive virtual agents that sit on a user's desktop and record and monitor how they interact with applications to perform tasks and processes. Algorithms are then used to map and analyze the processes.
• Intelligent Document Processing – The conversion of physical or unstructured documents into a structured, digital format that can be used in automation solutions. Optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NPL) are common tools used to enable this capability.
• Advanced Analytics – The gathering, synthesis, transformation, and delivery of insightful and consumable information that supports data-driven decision making. Data is queried from various disparate sources and can take on a variety of structured and unstructured formats.

Signals

Process automation is an executive priority and requires organizational buy-in

Stakeholders recognize the importance of business process automation and AI and are looking for ways to deliver more value using these technologies.

• 90% of executives stated automating business workflows post-COVID-19 will ensure business continuity (Kofax, 2022).
• 88% of executives stated they need to fast-track their end-to-end digital transformation (Kofax, 2022).

However, the advertised benefits to vendors of enabling these desired automations may not be easily achievable because of:

• Manual and undocumented business processes.
• Fragmented and inaccessible systems.
• Poor data quality, insights, and security.
• The lack of process governance and management practice.

	of CXOs stated staff sufficiency, skill and engagement issues as a minor IT pain point compared to 51% of CIOs stated this issue as a major pain point. Source: CEO-CIO Alignment Diagnostics, August 2021 to July 2022; n=568.
	of organizations have already invested in AI or machine learning. Source: Tech Trends and Priorities 2023; N=662

Drivers

Quality & throughput

Products and services delivered through an undefined and manual process risk the creation of preventable and catchable defects, security flaws and holes, missing information, and other quality issues. IA solutions consistently reinforce quality standards the same way across all products and services while tailoring outputs to meet an individual's specific needs. Success is dependent on the accurate interpretation and application of quality standards and the user's expectations.

Worker productivity

IA removes the tedious, routine, and mundane tasks that distract and restrict employees from doing more valuable, impactful, and cognitively focused activities. Practical insights can also be generated through IA tools that help employees make data-driven decisions, evaluate problems from different angles, and improve the usability and value of the products and services they produce.

Good process management practices

Automation magnifies existing inefficiencies of a business process management practice, such as unclear and outdated process documentation and incorrect assumptions. IA reinforces the importance of good business process optimization practices, such as removing waste and inefficiencies in a thoughtful way, choosing the most appropriate automation solution, and configuring the process in the right way to maximize the solution's value.

Benefits & Risks

Benefits

• Documentation
• Hands-Off
• Reusability

All business processes must be mapped and documented to be automated, including business rules, data entities, applications, and control points.

IA can be configured and orchestrated to automatically execute when certain business, process, or technology conditions are met in an unattended or attended manner.

IA is applicable in use cases beyond traditional business processes, such as automated testing, quality control, audit, website scraping, integration platform, customer service, and data transfer.

Risks

• Data Quality & Bias
• Ethics
• Recovery & Security
• Management

The accuracy and relevance of the decisions IA makes are dependent on the overall quality of the data
used to train it.

Some decisions can have significant reputational, moral, and ethical impacts if made incorrectly.
The question is whether it is appropriate for a non-human to make that decision.

IA is composed of technologies that can be compromised or fail. Without the proper monitoring, controls,
and recovery protocols, impacted IA will generate significant business and IT costs and can potentially harm customers, employees, and the organization.

Low- and no-code capabilities ease and streamline IA development, which makes it susceptible to becoming unmanageable. Discipline is needed to ensure IA owners are aware of the size and health of the IA portfolio.

Address your pressure points to fully realize the benefits of this priority

Success can be dependent on your ability to address your pressure points.

Recommendations

Build your business process automation playbook and practice

Formalize your business process automation practice with a good toolkit and a repeatable set of tactics and techniques.

• Clarify the problem being solved with IA.
• Optimate your processes. Apply good practices to first optimize (opti-) and then automate (-mate) key business processes.
• Deliver minimum viable automations (MVAs). Maximize the learning of automation solutions and business operational changes through small, strategic automation use cases.

Related Research:

• Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook

Explore the various IA tooling options

Each IA tool will address a different problem. Which tool to choose is dependent on a variety of factors, such as functional suitability, technology suitability, delivery and support capabilities, alignment to strategic business goals, and the value it is designed to deliver.

Related Research:

• Build Your First RPA Bot
• Build a Chatbot Proof of Concept

Recommendations

Introduce AI and ML thoughtfully and with a plan

Despite the many promises of AI, organizations are struggling to fully realize its potential. The reasons boil down to a lack of understanding of when these technologies should and shouldn't be used, as well as a fear of the unknown. The plan to adopt AI should include:

• Understanding of what AI really means in practice.
• Identifying specific applications of AI in the business.
• Understanding the type of AI applicable for the situation.

Related Research:

• Get Started with Artificial Intelligence
• Create an Architecture for AI

Mitigate AI and ML bias

Biases can be introduced into an IA system at any stage of the development process, from the data you collect, to the way you collect it, to which algorithms are used and what assumptions were made. In most cases, AI and ML bias is a is a social, political, and business problem.

While bias may not be intentional nor completely prevented or eliminated, early detection, good design, and other proactive preventative steps can be taken to minimize its scope and impact.

Related Research:

• Mitigate Machine Bias

CASE STUDY
University Hospitals

Challenge

University Hospitals Cleveland (UH) faces the same challenge that every major hospital confronts regarding how to deliver increasingly complex, high-quality healthcare to a diverse population efficiently and economically. In 2017, UH embarked on a value improvement program aiming to improve quality while saving $400 million over a five-year period.

In emergency department (ED) and inpatient units, leaders found anticipating demand difficult, and consequently units were often over-staffed when demand was low and under-staffed when demand was high. Hospital leaders were uncertain about how to reallocate resources based on capacity needs.

Solution

UH turned to Hospital IQ's Census Solution to proactively manage capacity, staff, and flow in the ED and inpatient areas.

By applying AI, ML, and external data (e.g. weather forecasts) to the hospital's own data (including EMR data and hospital policies), the solution helped UH make two-day census forecasts that managers used to determine whether to open or close in-patient beds and, when necessary, divert low-acuity patients to other hospitals in the system to handle predicted patient volume.

Source: University Hospitals

Results

ED boarding hours have declined by 10% and the hospital has seen a 50% reduction in the number of patients who leave the hospital without
being seen.

UH also predicts in advance patients ready for discharge and identifies roadblocks, reducing the average length of stay by 15%. UH is able to better manage staff, reducing overtime and cutting overall labor costs.

The hospital has also increased staff satisfaction and improved patient safety by closing specific units on weekends and increasing the number of rooms that can be sterilized.

Proactive Application Management

PRIORITY 3

• Strengthen Applications to Prevent and Minimize the Impact of Future Issues

Application management is often viewed as a support function rather than an enabler of business growth. Focus and investments are only placed on application management when it becomes a problem. The lack of governance and practice accountability leaves this practice in a chaotic state: politics take over, resources are not strategically allocated, and customers are frustrated. As a result, application management is often reactive and brushed aside for new development.

Introduction

What is application management?

Application management ensures valuable software is successfully delivered and is maintained for continuous and sustainable business operations. It contains a repeatable set of activities needed to rationalize and roadmap products and services while balancing priorities of new features and maintenance tasks.

Unfortunately, application management is commonly perceived as a practice that solely addresses issues, updates, and incidents. However, application management teams are also tasked with new value delivery that was not part of the original release.

Why is an effective application maintenance (reactive) practice not good enough?

Application maintenance is the "process of modifying a software system or its components after delivery to correct faults, improve performance or other attributes, or adapt to a changed environment or business process," (IEEE, 1998). While it is critical to quickly fix defects and issues when they occur, reactively addressing them is more expensive than discovering them early and employing the practices to prevent them.

Even if an application is working well, its framework, architecture, and technology may not be compatible with the possible upcoming changes stakeholders and vendors may want to undertake. Applications may not be problems now, but they soon can be.

What motivates proactive application changes?

Proactive application management must be disciplined and applied strategically

Proactive application management practices are critical to maintaining business continuity. They require continuous review and modification so that applications are resilient and can address current and future scenarios. Depending on the value of the application, its criticality to business operations, and its susceptibility to technology change, a more proactive management approach may be warranted. Stakeholders can then better manage resources and budget according to the needs of specific products.

Reactive Management

Run-to-Failure

Fix and enhance the product when it breaks. In most cases, a plan is in place ahead of a failure, so that the problem can be addressed without significant disruption and costs.

Preventive

Regularly inspect and optimize the product to reduce the likelihood that it will fail in the future. Schedule inspections based on a specific timeframe or usage threshold.

Predictive

Predict failures before they happen using performance and usage data to alert teams when products are at risk of failure according to specified conditions.

Reliability and Risk Based

Analyze all possible failure scenarios for each component of the product and create tailored delivery plans to improve the stability, reliability, and value of each product.

Proactive Management

Signals

Applications begin to degrade as soon as they are used

Today's applications are tomorrow's shelfware. They gradually lose their value, stability, robustness, and compatibility with other enterprise technologies. The longer these applications are left unattended or simply "keeping the lights on," the more risks they will bring to the application portfolio, such as:

• Discovery and exploitation of security flaws and gaps.
• Increasing the lock-in to specific vendor technologies.
• Inconsistent application performance across various workloads.

These impacts are further compounded by the continuous work done on a system burdened with technical debt. Technical debt describes the result of avoided costs that, over time, cause ongoing business impacts. Left unaddressed, technical debt can become an existential threat that risks your organization's ability to effectively compete and serve its customers. Unfortunately, most organizations have a significant, growing, unmanageable technical debt portfolio.

	of respondents stated they saw an increase in perceived change in technical debt during the past three years. A quarter of respondents indicated that it stayed the same. Source: McKinsey Digital, 2020.
US $4.35 Million	is the average cost of a data breach in 2022. This figure represents a 2.6% increase from last year. The average cost has climbed 12.7% since 2020. Source: IBM, 2022; N=537.

Drivers

Technical debt

Historical decisions to meet business demands by deferring key quality, architectural, or other software delivery activities often lead to inefficient and incomplete code, fragile legacy systems, broken processes, data quality problems, and the other contributors to technical debt. The impacts for this challenge is further heightened if organizations are not actively refactoring and updating their applications behind the scenes. Proactive application management is intended to raise awareness of application fragility and prioritize comprehensive refactoring activities alongside new feature development.

Long-term application value

Applications are designed, developed, and tested against a specific set of parameters which may become less relevant over time as the business matures, technology changes, and user behaviors and interactions shift. Continuous monitoring of the application system, regular stakeholder and user feedback, and active technology trend research and vendor engagement will reveal tasks to prepare an application for future value opportunities or stability and resilience concerns.

Security and resiliency

Innovative approaches to infiltrating and compromising applications are becoming prevailing stakeholder concerns. The loopholes and gaps in existing application security protocols, control points, and end-user training are exploited to gain the trust of unsuspecting users and systems. Proactive application management enforces continuous security reviews to determine whether applications are at risk. The goal is to prevent an incident from happening by hardening or complementing measures already in place.

Benefits & Risks

Benefits

• Consistent Performance
• Robustness
• Operating Costs

Users expect the same level of performance and experience from their applications in all scenarios. A proactive approach ensures the configurations meet the current needs of users and dependent technologies.

Proactively managed applications are resilient to the latest security concerns and upcoming trends.

Continuous improvements to the underlying architecture, codebase, and interfaces can minimize the cost to maintain and operate the application, such as the transition to a loosely coupled architecture and the standardization of REST APIs.

Risks

• Stakeholder Buy-In
• Delayed Feature Releases
• Team Capacity
• Discipline

Stakeholders may not see the association between the application's value and its technical quality.

Updates and enhancements are system changes much like any application function. Depending
on the priority of these changes, new functions may be pushed off to a future release cycle.

Applications teams require dedicated capacity to proactively manage applications, but they are often occupied meeting other stakeholder demands.

Overinvesting in certain application management activities (such as refactoring, re-architecture, and redesign) can create more challenges. Knowing how much to do is important.

Address your pressure points to fully realize the benefits of this priority

Success can be dependent on your ability to address your pressure points.

Recommendations

Reinforce your application maintenance practice

Maintenance is often viewed as a support function rather than an enabler of business growth. Focus and investments are only placed on maintenance when it becomes a problem.

• Justify the necessity of streamlined maintenance.
• Strengthen triaging and prioritization practices.
• Establish and govern a repeatable process.

Ensure product issues, incidents, defects, and change requests are promptly handled to minimize business and IT risks.

Related Research:

• Streamline Application Maintenance

Build an application management practice

Apply the appropriate management approaches to maintain business continuity and balance priorities and commitments among maintenance and new development requests.

This practice serves as the foundation for creating exceptional customer experience by emphasizing cross-functional accountability for business value and product and service quality.

Related Research:

• Streamline Application Management

Recommendations

Manage your technical debt

Technical debt is a type of technical risk, which in turn is business risk. It's up to the business to decide whether to accept technical debt or mitigate it. Create a compelling argument to stakeholders as to why technical debt should be a business priority rather than just an IT one.

• Define and identify your technical debt.
• Conduct a business impact analysis.
• Identify opportunities to better manage technical debt.

Related Research:

• Manage Your Technical Debt

Gauge your application's health

Application portfolio management is nearly impossible to perform without an honest and thorough understanding of your portfolio's alignment to business capabilities, business value, total cost of ownership, end-user reception and satisfaction, and technical health.

Develop data-driven insights to help you decide which applications to retire, upgrade, retrain on, or maintain to meet the demands of the business.

Related Research:

• Application Portfolio Management Foundations

Recommendations

Adopt site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps practices

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is an operational model for running online services more reliably by a team of dedicated reliability-focused engineers.

DevOps, an operational philosophy promoting development and operations collaboration, can bring the critical insights to make application management practices through SRE more valuable.

Related Research:

• Implement DevOps Practices That Work
• Site Reliability Engineering: What Is It? Why Is It Important for Online Businesses?
• SLOs in Site Reliability Engineering

CASE STUDY
Government Agency

Goal

A government agency needed to implement a disciplined, sustainable application delivery, planning, and management process so their product delivery team could deliver features and changes faster with higher quality. The goal was to ensure change requests, fixes, and new features would relieve requester frustrations, reduce regression issues, and allow work to be done on agreeable and achievable priorities organization-wide. The new model needed to increase practice efficiency and visibility in order to better manage technical debt and focus on value-added solutions.

Solution

This organization recognized a number of key challenges that were inhibiting its team's ability to meet its goals:

• The product backlog had become too long and unmanageable.
• Delivery resources were not properly allocated to meet the skills and capabilities needed to successfully meet commitments.
• Quality wasn't defined or enforced, which generated mounting technical debt.
• There was a lack of clear metrics and defined roles and responsibilities.
• The business had unrealistic and unachievable expectations.

Source: Info-Tech Workshop

Key practices implemented

• Schedule quarterly business satisfaction surveys.
• Structure and facilitate regular change advisory board meetings.
• Define and enforce product quality standards.
• Standardize a streamlined process with defined roles.
• Configure management tools to better handle requests.

Multisource Systems

PRIORITY 4

• Manage an Ecosystem Composed of In-House and Outsourced Systems

Various market and company factors are motivating a review on resource and system sourcing strategies. The right sourcing model provides key skills, resources, and capabilities to meet innovation, time to market, financial, and quality goals of the business. However, organizations struggle with how best to support sourcing partners and to allocate the right number of resources to maximize success.

Introduction

A multisource system is an ecosystem of integrated internally and externally developed applications, data, and infrastructure. These technologies can be custom developed, heavily configured vendor solutions, or they may be commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions. These systems can also be developed, supported, and managed by internal staff, in partnership with outsourced contractors, or be completely outsourced. Multisource systems should be configured and orchestrated in a way that maximizes the delivery of specific value drivers for the targeted audience.

Successfully selecting a sourcing approach is not a simple RFP exercise to choose the lowest cost

Defining and executing a sourcing approach can be a significant investment and risk because of the close interactions third-party services and partners will have with internal staff, enterprise applications and business capabilities. A careful selection and design is necessary.

The selection of a sourcing partner is not simple. It involves the detailed inspection and examination of different candidates and matching their fit to the broader vision of the multisource system. In cases where control is critical, technology stack and resource sourcing consolidation to a few vendors and partners is preferred. In other cases, where worker productivity and system flexibility are highly prioritized, a plug-and-play best-of-breed approach is preferred.

Sourcing needs to be driven by your department and system strategies

How does the department want to be perceived?

The image that your applications department and teams want to reflect is frequently dependent on the applications they deliver and support, the resources they are composed of, and the capabilities they provide.

Therefore, choosing the right sourcing approach should be driven by understanding who the teams are and want to be (e.g. internal builder, an integrator, a plug-in player), what they can or want to do (e.g. custom-develop or implement), and what they can deliver or support (e.g. cloud or on-premises) must be established.

What value is the system delivering?

Well-integrated systems are the lifeblood of your organization. They provide the capabilities needed to deliver value to customers, employees, and stakeholders. However, underlying system components may not be sourced under a unified strategy, which can lead to duplicate vendor services and high operational costs.

The right sourcing approach ensures your partners address key capabilities in your system's delivery and support, and that they are positioned to maximize the value of critical and high-impact components.

Signals

Business demand may outpace what vendors can support or offer

Outsourcing and shifting to a buy-over-build applications strategy are common quick fixes to dealing with capacity and skills gaps. However, these quick fixes often become long-term implementations that are not accounted for in the sourcing selection process. Current application and resource sourcing strategies must be reviewed to ensure that vendor arrangements meet the current and upcoming demands and challenges of the business, customers, and enterprise technologies, such as:

• Pressure from stakeholders to lower operating costs while maintaining or increasing quality and throughput.
• Technology lock-in that addresses short-term needs but inhibits long-term growth and maturity.
• Team capacity and talent acquisition not meeting the needs of the business.

	of respondents stated they outsourced software development fully or partly in the last 12 months (2021). Source: Coding Sans, 2021.
	of respondents stated they were at least somewhat satisfied with the result of outsourcing software development. Source: Coding Sans, 2021.

Drivers

Business-managed applications

Employees are implementing and building applications without consulting, notifying, or heeding the advice of IT. IT is often ill-equipped and under-resourced to fight against shadow IT. Instead, organizations are shifting the mindset of "fight shadow IT" to "embrace business-managed applications," using good practices in managing multisource systems. A multisource approach strikes the right balance between user empowerment and centralized control with the solutions and architecture that can best enable it.

Unique problems to solve

Point solutions offer features to address unique use cases in uncommon technology environments. However, point solutions are often deployed in siloes with limited integration or overlap with other solutions. The right sourcing strategy accommodates the fragmented nature of point solutions into a broader enterprise system strategy, whether that be:

• Multisource best of breed – integrate various technologies that provide subsets of the features needed for supporting business functions.
• Multisource custom – integrate systems built in-house with technologies developed by external organizations.
• Vendor add-ons and integrations – enhance an existing vendor's offering by using their system add-ons as upgrades, new add-ons, or integrations.

Vendor services

Some vendor services in a multisource environment may be redundant, conflicting, or incompatible. Given that multisource systems are regularly changing, it is difficult to identify what services are affected, what would be needed to fill the gap of the removed solution, or which redundant services should be removed.

A multisource approach motivates the continuous rationalization of your vendor services and partners to determine the right mixture of in-house and outsourced resources, capabilities, and technologies.

Benefits & Risks

Benefits

• Business-Focused Solution
• Flexibility
• Cost Optimization

Multisource systems can be designed to support an employee's ability to select the tools they want and need.

The environment is architected in a loosely coupled approach to allow applications to be easily added, removed, and modified with minimized impact to other integrated applications.

Rather than investing in large solutions upfront, applications are adopted when they are needed and are removed when little value is gained. Disciplined application portfolio management is necessary to see the full value of this benefit.

Risks

• Manageable Sprawl
• Policy Adherence
• Integration & Compatibility

The increased number and diversity of applications in multisource system environments can overwhelm system managers who do not have an effective application portfolio management practice.

Fragmented application implementations risk inconsistent adherence to security and other quality policies, especially in situations where IT is not involved.

Application integration can quickly become tangled, untraceable, and unmanageable because of varying team and vendor preferences for specific integration technologies and techniques.

Address your pressure points to fully realize the benefits of this priority

Success can be dependent on your ability to address your pressure points.

Recommendations

Define the goals of your applications department and product vision

Understanding the applications team's purpose and image is critical in determining how the system they are managing and the skills and capacities they need should be sourced.

Changing and conflicting definitions of value and goals make it challenging to convey an agreeable strategy of the multisource system. An achievable vision and practical tactics ensure all parties in the multisource system are moving in the same direction.

Related Research:

• Build an Application Department Strategy
• Deliver On Your Digital Product Vision

Develop a sourcing partner strategy

Almost half of all sourcing initiatives do not realize projected savings, and the biggest reason is the choice of partner (Zhang et al., 2018). Making the wrong choice means inferior products, higher costs and the loss of both clients and reputation.

Choosing the right sourcing partner involves understanding current skills and capacities, finding the right matching partner based on a desired profile, and managing a good working relationship that sees short-term gains and supports long-term goals.

Related Research:

• Select a Sourcing Partner for Your Application Development Team
• Drive Successful Sourcing Outcomes with a Robust RFP Process
• Jump Start Your Vendor Management Initiative

Recommendations

Strengthen enterprise integration practices

Integration strategies that are focused solely on technology are likely to complicate rather than simplify because little consideration is given on how other systems and processes will be impacted. Enterprise integration needs to bring together business process, applications, and data – in that order.

Kick-start the process of identifying opportunities for improvement by mapping how applications and data are coordinated to support business activities.

Related Research:

• Build Effective Enterprise Integration on the Back of Business Process
• Build an Application Integration Strategy
• Build a Data Integration Strategy

Manage your solution architecture and application portfolio

Haphazardly implementing and integrating applications can generate significant security, performance, and data risks. A well-thought-through solution architecture is essential in laying the architecture quality principles and roadmap on how the multisource system can grow and evolve in a sustainable and maintainable way.

Good application portfolio management complements the solution architecture as it indicates when low-value and unused applications should be removed to reduce system complexity.

Related Research:

• Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practices
• Application Portfolio Management Foundations

Recommendations

Embrace business-managed applications

Multisource systems bring a unique opportunity to support the business and end users' desire to implement and develop their own applications. However, traditional models of managing applications may not accommodate the specific IT governance and management practices required to operate business-managed applications:

• A collaborative and trusting business-IT relationship is key.
• The role of IT must be reimagined.
• Business must be accountable for its decisions.

Related Research:

• Embrace Business-Managed Applications

CASE STUDY
Cognizant

Situation

• Strives to be primarily an industry-aligned organization that delivers multiple service lines in multiple geographies.
• Cognizant seeks to carefully consider client culture to create a one-team environment.
• Value proposition is a consultative approach bringing thought leadership and mutually adding value to the relationship vs. the more traditional order-taker development partner.
• Wants to share in solution development to facilitate shared successes. Geographic alignment drives knowledge of the client and their challenges, not just about time zone and supportability.
• Offers one of the largest offshore capabilities in the world, supported by local and nearshore resources to drive local knowledge.
• Today's clients don't typically want a black box, they are sophisticated and want transparency around the process and solution, to have a partner.
• Clients do want to know where the work is being delivered from, how it's being done.

Source: interview with Jay MacIsaac, Cognizant.

Approach

• Best relationship comes where teams operate as one.
• Clients are seeking value, not a development black box.
• Clients want to have a partner they can engage with, not just an order taker.
• Want to build a one-team culture with shared goals and deliver business value.
• Seek a partner that will add to their thinking not echo it.

Results

• Cognizant is continuing to deliver double-digit growth and continues to strive for top quartile performance.
• Growth in the client base has seen the company grow to over 340,000 associates worldwide.

Digital Organization as a Platform

PRIORITY 5

• Create a Common Digital Interface to Access All Products and Services

A digital platform enables organizations to leverage a flexible, reliable, and scalable foundation to create a valuable DX, ease delivery and management efforts, maximize existing investments, and motivate the broader shift to digital. This approach provides a standard to architect, integrate, configure, and modernize the applications that compose the platform.

Introduction

What is digital organization as a platform (DOaaP)?

Digital organization as a platform (DOaaP) is a collection of integrated digital services, products, applications, and infrastructure that is used as a vehicle to meet and exceed an organization's digital strategies. It often serves as an accessible "place for exchanges of information, goods, or services to occur between producers and consumers as well as the community that interacts
with said platform" (Watts, 2020).

DOaaP involves a strategy that paves the way for organizations to be digital. It helps organizations use their assets (e.g. data, processes, products, services) in the most effective ways and become more open to cooperative delivery, usage, and management. This opens opportunities for innovation and cross-department collaborations.

How is DOaaP described?

1. Open and Collaborative
   • Open organization: open data, open APIs, transparency, and user participation.
   • Collaboration, co-creation, crowdsourcing, and innovation
2. Accessible and Connected
   • Digital inclusion
   • Channel ubiquity
   • Integrity and interoperability
   • Digital marketplace
3. Digital and Programmable
   • Digital identity
   • Policies and processes as code
   • Digital products and services
   • Enabling digital platforms

Digital organizations follow a common set of principles and practices

Customer-centricity

Digital organizations are driven by customer focus, meeting and exceeding customer expectations. It must design its services with a "digital first" principle, providing access through every expected channel and including seamless integration and interoperability with various departments, partners, and third-party services. It also means creating trust in its ability to provide secure services and to keep privacy and ethics as core pillars.

Leadership, management, and strategies

Digital leadership brings customer focus to the enterprise and its structures and organizes efficient networks and ecosystems. Accomplishing this means getting rid of silos and a siloed mentality and aligning on a digital vision to design policies and services that are efficient, cost-effective, and provide maximum benefit to the user. Asset sharing, co-creation, and being open and transparent become cornerstones of a digital organization.

Infrastructure

Providing digital services across demographics and geographies requires infrastructure, and that in turn requires long-term vision, smart investments, and partnerships with various source partners to create the necessary foundational infrastructure upon which to build digital services.

Digitization and automation

Automation and digitization of processes and services, as well as creating digital-first products, lead to increased efficiency and reach of the organization across demographics and geographies. Moreover, by taking a digital-first approach, digital organizations future-proof their services and demonstrate their commitment to stakeholders.

Enabling platforms

DOaaP embraces open standards, designing and developing organizational platforms and ecosystems with a cloud-first mindset and sound API strategies. Developer experience must also take center stage, providing the necessary tools and embracing Agile and DevOps practices and culture become prerequisites. Cybersecurity and privacy are central to the digital platform; hence they must be part of the design and development principles and practices.

Signals

The business expects support for digital products and services

Digital transformation continues to be a high-priority initiative for many organizations, and they see DOaaP as an effective way to enable and exploit digital capabilities. However, DOaaP unleashes new strategies, opportunities, and challenges that are elusive or unfamiliar to business leaders. Barriers in current business operating models may limit DOaaP success, such as:

• Department and functional silos
• Dispersed, fragmented and poor-quality data
• Ill-equipped and under-skilled resources to support DOaaP adoption
• System fragmentation and redundancies
• Inconsistent integration tactics employed across systems
• Disjointed user experience leading to low engagement and adoption

DOaaP is not just about technology, and it is not the sole responsibility of either IT or business. It is the collective responsibility of the organization.

	of organizations plan to unlock new value through digital. 50% of organizations are planning major transformation over the next three years. Source: Nash Squared, 2022.
	of organizations are undertaking digital expansion projects focused on scaling their business with technology. This result is up from 57% in 2021. Source: F5 Inc, 2022.

Drivers

Unified brand and experience

Users should have the same experience and perception of a brand no matter what product or service they use. However, fragmented implementation of digital technologies and inconsistent application of design standards makes it difficult to meet this expectation. DOaaP embraces a single design and DX standard for all digital products and services, which creates a consistent perception of your organization's brand and reputation irrespective of what products and services are being used and how they are accessed.

Accessibility

Rapid advancement of end-user devices and changes to end-user behaviors and expectations often outpace an organization's ability to meet these requirements. This can make certain organization products and services difficult to find, access and leverage. DOaaP creates an intuitive and searchable interface to all products and services and enables the strategic combination of technologies to collectively deliver more value.

Justification for modernization

Many opportunities are left off the table when legacy systems are abstracted away rather than modernized. However, legacy systems may not justify the investment in modernization because their individual value is outweighed by the cost. A DOaaP initiative motivates decision makers to look at the entire system (i.e. modern and legacy) to determine which components need to be brought up to a minimum digital state. The conversation has now changed. Legacy systems should be modernized to increase the collective benefit of the entire DOaaP.

Benefits & Risks

Benefits

• Look & Feel
• User Adoption
• Shift to Digital

A single, modern, customizable interface enables a common look and feel no matter what and how the platform is being accessed.

Organizations can motivate and encourage the adoption and use of all products and services through the platform and increase the adoption of underused technologies.

DOaaP motivates and supports the modernization of data, processes, and systems to meet the goals and objectives outlined in the broader digital transformation strategy.

Risks

• Data Quality
• System Stability
• Ability to Modernize
• Business Model Change

Each system may have a different definition of commonly used entities (e.g. customer), which can cause data quality issues when information is shared among these systems.

DOaaP can stress the performance of underlying systems due to the limitations of some systems to handle increased traffic.

Some systems cannot be modernized due to cost constraints, business continuity risks, vendor lock-in, legacy and lore, or other blocking factors.

Limited appetite to make the necessary changes to business operations in order to maximize the value of DOaaP technologies.

Address your pressure points to fully realize the benefits of this priority

Success can be dependent on your ability to address your pressure points.

Recommendations

Define your platform vision

Organizations realize that a digital model is the way to provide more effective services to their customers and end users in a cost-effective, innovative, and engaging fashion. DOaaP is a way to help support this transition.

However, various platform stakeholders will have different interpretations of and preferences for what this platform is intended to solve, what benefits it is supposed to deliver, and what capabilities it will deliver. A grounded vision is imperative to steer the roadmap and initiatives.

Related Research:

• Drive Digital Transformation with Platform Strategies
• Gov 2.0: Government as a Platform
• Deliver Digital Products at Scale

Assess and modernize your applications

Certain applications may not sufficiently support the compatibility, flexibility, and efficiency requirements of DOaaP. While workaround technologies and tactics can be employed to overcome these application challenges, the full value of the DOaaP may not be realized.

Reviewing the current state of the application portfolio will indicate the functional and value limitations of what DOaaP can provide and an indication of the scope of investment needed to bring applications up to a minimum state.

Related Research:

• Application Portfolio Management Foundations
• Modernize Your Applications

Recommendations

Understand and evaluate end-user needs

Technology has reached a point where it's no longer difficult for teams to build functional and valuable digital platforms. Rather, the difficulty lies in creating an interface and platform that people want to use and use frequently.

While it is important to increase the access and promotion of all products and services, orchestrating and configuring them in a way to deliver a satisfying experience is even more important. Applications teams must first learn about and empathize with the needs of end users.

Related Research:

• Use Experience Design to Drive Empathy With the Business
• Implement and Mature Your User Experience Design Practice

Architect your platform

Formalizing and constructing DOaaP just for the sake of doing so often results in an initiative that is lengthy and costly and ends up being considered a failure.

The build and optimization of the platform must be predicated on a thorough understanding of the DOaaP's goals, objectives, and priorities and the business capabilities and process they are meant to support and enable. The appropriate architecture and delivery practices can then be defined and employed.

Related Research:

• Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practices
• Build Your Data Practice and Platform

CASE STUDY
e-Estonia

Situation

The digital strategy of Estonia resulted in e-Estonia, with the vision of "creating a society with more transparency, trust, and efficiency." Estonia has addressed the challenge by creating structures, organizations, and a culture of innovation, and then using the speed and efficiency of digital infrastructure, apps, and services. This strategy can reduce or eliminate bureaucracy through transparency and automation.

Estonia embarked on its journey to making digital a priority in 1994-1996, focusing on a committed investment in infrastructure and digital literacy. With that infrastructure in place, they started providing digital services like an e-banking service (1996), e-tax and mobile parking (2002), and then went full steam ahead with a digital information interoperability platform in 2001, digital identity in 2002, e-health in 2008, and e-prescription in 2010. The government is now strategizing for AI.

Results

Source: e-Estonia

Practices employed

The e-Estonia digital government model serves as a reference for governments across the world; this is acknowledged by the various awards it has received, like #2 in "internet freedom," awarded by Freedom House in 2019; #1 on the "digital health index," awarded by the Bertelsmann Foundation in 2019; and #1 on "start-up friendliness," awarded by Index Venture in 2018.

References

"15th State of Agile Report." Digital.ai, 2021. Web.
"2022 HR Trends Report." McLean & Company, 2022.
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Research Contributors and Experts

Chris Harrington
Chief Technology Officer
Carolinas Telco Federal Credit Union

Chris Harrington is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Carolinas Telco Federal Credit Union. Harrington is a proven leader with over 20 years of experience developing and leading information technology and cybersecurity strategies and teams in the financial industry space.

Benjamin Palacio
Senior Information Technology Analyst County of Placer

Benjamin Palacio has been working in the application development space since 2007 with a strong focus on system integrations. He has seamlessly integrated applications data across multiple states into a single reporting solution for management teams to evaluate, and he has codeveloped applications to manage billions in federal funding. He is also a CSAC-credentialed IT Executive (CA, USA).

Scott Rutherford
Executive Vice President, Technology
LGM Financial Services Inc.

Scott heads the Technology division of LGM Financial Services Inc., a leading provider of warranty and financing products to automotive OEMs and dealerships in Canada. His responsibilities include strategy and execution of data and analytics, applications, and technology operations.

Robert Willatts
IT Manager, Enterprise Business Solutions and Project Services
Town of Newmarket

Robert is passionate about technology, innovation, and Smart City Initiatives. He makes customer satisfaction as the top priority in every one of his responsibilities and accountabilities as an IT manager, such as developing business applications, implementing and maintaining enterprise applications, and implementing technical solutions. Robert encourages communication, collaboration, and engagement as he leads and guides IT in the Town of Newmarket.

Randeep Grewal
Vice President, Enterprise Applications
Red Hat

Randeep has over 25 years of experience in enterprise applications, advanced analytics, enterprise data management, and consulting services, having worked at numerous blue-chip companies. In his most recent role, he is the Vice President of Enterprise Applications at Red Hat. Reporting to the CIO, he is responsible for Red Hat's core business applications with a focus on enterprise transformation, application architecture, engineering, and operational excellence. He previously led the evolution of Red Hat into a data-led company by maturing the enterprise data and analytics function to include data lake, streaming data, data governance, and operationalization of analytics for decision support.

Prior to Red Hat, Randeep was the director of global services strategy at Lenovo, where he led the strategy using market data to grow Lenovo's services business by over $400 million in three years. Prior to Lenovo, Randeep was the director of advanced analytics at Alliance One and helped build an enterprise data and analytics function. His earlier work includes seven years at SAS, helping SAS become a leader in business analytics, and at KPMG consulting, where he managed services engagements at Fortune 100 companies.

Define Requirements for Outsourcing the Service Desk

Prepare your RFP for long-term success, not short-term gains

Define Requirements for Outsourcing the Service Desk

Prepare your RFP for long-term success, not short-term gains

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

Outsource services with your eyes wide open.

Cost reduction has traditionally been an incentive for outsourcing the service desk. This is especially the case for organizations that don't have minimal processes in place and those that need resources and skills to fill gaps.

Although cost reduction is usually the main reason to outsource the service desk, in most cases service desk outsourcing increases the cost in a short run. But without a proper model, you will only outsource your problems rather than solving them. A successful outsourcing strategy follows a comprehensive plan that defines objectives, assigns accountabilities, and sets expectations for service delivery prior to vendor outreach.

For outsourcing the service desk, you should plan ahead, work as a group, define requirements, prepare a strong RFP, and contemplate tension metrics to ensure continual improvement. As you build a project charter to outline your strategy for outsourcing your IT services, ensure you focus on better customer service instead of cost optimization. Ensure that the outsourcer can support your demands, considering your long-term achievement.

Think about outsourcing like a marriage deed. Take into account building a good relationship before beginning the contract, ensure to include expectations in the agreement, and make it possible to exit the agreement if expectations are not satisfied or service improvement is not achieved.

Mahmoud Ramin, PhD
Senior Research Analyst
Infrastructure and Operations
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

In organizations where technical support is viewed as non-strategic, many see outsourcing as a cost-effective way to provide this support. However, outsourcing projects often fall short of their goals in terms of cost savings and quality of support.

Common Obstacles

Significant administrative work and up-front costs are required to outsource the service desk, and poor planning often results in project failure and the decrease of end-user satisfaction.

A complete turnover of the service desk can result in lost knowledge and control over processes, and organizations without an exit strategy can struggle to bring their service desk back in house and reestablish the confidence of end users.

Info-Tech's Approach

• First decide if outsourcing is the correct step; there may be more preliminary work to do beforehand.
• Assess requirements and make necessary adjustments before developing an outsource RFP.
• Clearly define the project and produce an RFP to provide to vendors.
• Plan for long-term success, not short-term gains.
• Prepare to retain some of the higher-level service desk work.

Info-Tech Insight

Outsourcing is easy. Realizing all of the expected cost, quality, and focus benefits is hard. Successful outsourcing without being directly involved in service desk management is almost impossible.

Your challenge

This research is designed to help organizations that need to:

• Outsource the service desk or portions of service management to improve service delivery.
• Improve and repatriate existing outsourcing outcomes by becoming more engaged in the management of the function. Regular reviews of performance metrics, staffing, escalation, knowledge base content, and customer satisfaction are critical.
• Understand the impact that outsourcing would have on the service desk.
• Understand the potential benefits that outsourcing can bring to the organization.

Info-Tech Insight

The outsourcing contract must preserve your control, possession, and ownership of the intellectual property involved in the service desk operation. From the beginning of the process, repatriation should be viewed as a possibility and preserved as a capability.

Your challenge

This research helps organizations who would like to achieve these goals:

• Determine objectives and requirements to outsource the service desk.
• Develop a project charter and build an outsourcing strategy to efficiently define processes to reduce risk of failure.
• Build an outsourcing RFP and conduct interviews to identify the best candidate for service delivery.
• Build a long-term relationship with an outsourcing vendor, making sure the vendor is able to satisfy all requirements.
• Include a continual improvement plan in the outsourcing strategy and contain the option upon service delivery dissatisfaction.

New hires require between 10 and 80 hours of training (Forward Bpo Inc., 2019).

A benchmark study by Zendesk from 45,000 companies reveals that timely resolution of issues and 24/7 service are the biggest factors in customer service experience.

These factors push many businesses to consider service desk outsourcing to vendors that have capabilities to fulfill such requirements.

Common obstacles

These barriers make this challenge difficult to address for many organizations:

• In most cases, organizations must perform significant administrative work before they can make a move. Those that fail to properly prepare impede a smooth transition, the success of the vendor, and the ability to repatriate.
• Successful outsourcing comes from the recognition that an organization is experiencing complete turnover of its service desk staff. These organizations engage the vendor to transition knowledge and process to ensure continuity of quality.
• IT realizes the most profound hidden costs of outsourcing when the rate of ticket escalation increases, diminishing the capacity of senior technical staff for strategic project work.

Many organizations may not get the value they expect from outsourcing in their first year.

Common Reasons:

• Overall lack of due diligence in the outsourcing process
• Unsuitable or unclear service transition plan
• Poor service provider selection and management

Poor transition planning results in delayed benefits and a poor relationship with your outsourcing service provider. A poor relationship with your service provider results in poor communication and knowledge transfer.

Key components of a successful plan:

1. Determine goals and identify requirements before developing an RFP.
2. Finalize your outsourcing project charter and get ready for vendor evaluation.
3. Assess and select the most appropriate provider; manage the transition and vendor relationship.

Outsource the service desk properly, and you could see a wide range of benefits

Info-Tech Insight

In your service desk outsourcing strategy, rethink downsizing first-level IT service staff. This can be an opportunity to reassign resources to more valuable roles, such as asset management, development or project backlog. Your current service desk staff are most likely familiar with the current technology, processes, and regulations within IT. Consider the ways to better use your existing resources before reducing headcount.

Info-Tech's Approach

Determine Goals

Conduct activities in the blueprint to pinpoint your current challenges with the service desk and find out objectives to outsource customer service.

Define Requirements

You need to be clear about the processes that will be outsourced. Considering your objectives, we'll help you discover the processes to outsource, to help you achieve your goals.

Develop RFP

Your expectations should be documented in a formal proposal to help vendors provide solid information about how they will satisfy your requirements and what their plan is.

Build Long-Term Relationship

Make sure to plan for continual improvement by setting expectations, tracking the services with proper metrics, and using efficient communication with the provider. Think about the rainy day and include exit conditions for ending the relationship if needed.

Info-Tech's methodology

Insight summary

Focus on value

Outsourcing is easy. Realizing all of the expected cost, quality, and focus benefits is hard. Successful outsourcing without being directly involved in service desk management is almost impossible.

Define outsourcing requirements

You don't need to standardize before you outsource, but you still need to conduct your due diligence. If you outsource without thinking about how you want the future to work, you will likely be unsatisfied with the result.

Don't focus on cost

If cost is your only driver for outsourcing, understand that there will be other challenges. Customer service quality will likely be less, and your outsourcer may not add on frills such as Continual Improvement. Be careful that your specialists don't end up spending more time working on incidents and service requests.

Emphasize on customer service

A bad outsourcer relationship will result in low business satisfaction with IT overall. The service desk is the face of IT, and if users are dissatisfied with the service desk, then they are much likelier to be dissatisfied with IT overall.

Vendors are not magicians

They have standards in place to help them succeed. Determine ITSM best practices, define your requirements, and adjust process workflows accordingly. Your staff and end users will have a much easier transition once outsourcing proceeds.

Plan ahead to guarantee success

Identify outsourcing goals, plan for service and system integrations, document standard incidents and requests, and track tension metrics to make sure the vendor does the work efficiently. Aim for building a long-term relationship but contemplate potential exit strategy.

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

	Service Desk Outsourcing Requirements Database Library Use this library to guide you through processes to outsource
	Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template Use this template to craft a proposal for outsourcing your service desk
	Service Desk Outsourcing Reference Interview Template Use this template to verify vendor claims on service delivery with pervious or current customers
	Service Desk Outsourcing Vendor Proposal Scoring Tool Use this tool to evaluate RFP submissions
Key deliverable:
	Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter Document your project scope and outsourcing strategy in this template to organize the project for efficient resource and requirement allocation

Blueprint benefits

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

Guided Implementation

"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

Workshop

"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is between 8 to 10 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

Phase 1

Define the goal

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• Analysis outsourcing objectives
• Assess outsourcing feasibility
• Identify services and processes to outsource

This phase involves the following participants:

• Service Desk Team
• IT Leadership

Define requirements for outsourcing service desk support

Step 1.1

Identify goals and objectives

Activities

1.1.1 Find out why you want to outsource your service desk

1.1.2 Document the benefits of outsourcing your service desk

1.1.3 Identify your outsourcing vision and goals

1.1.4 Prioritize service desk outsourcing goals to help structure your mission statement

1.1.5 Craft a mission statement that demonstrates your decision to reach your outsourcing objectives

Define the goal

This step requires the following inputs:

• List of strengths and weaknesses of the service desk
• Challenges with the service desk

This step involves the following participants:

• CIO
• IT Leadership
• Service Desk Manager
• IT Managers

Outcomes of this step

• Service desk outsourcing vision and goals
• Benefits of outsourcing the service desk
• Mission statement

What is your rationale to outsource the service desk?

Potential benefits of outsourcing the service desk:

• Bring in the expertise and knowledge to manage tickets according to best-practice guidelines
• Reduce the timeline to response and resolution
• Improve IT productivity
• Enhance IT services and improve performance
• Augment relationship between IT and business through service-level improvement
• Free up the internal team and focus IT on complex projects and higher priority tasks
• Speed up service desk optimization
• Improve end-user satisfaction through efficient IT services
• Reduce impact of incidents through effective incident management
• Increase service consistency via turnover reduction
• Expand coverage hour and access points
• Expand languages to service different geographical areas

1.1.1 Find out why you want to outsource your service desk

1 hour

Service desk is the face of IT. Service desk improvement increases IT efficiency, lowers operation costs, and enhances business satisfaction.

Common challenges that result in deciding to outsource the service desk are:

Participants: IT Director, Service Desk Manager, Service Desk Team

Brainstorm your challenges with the service desk. Why have you decided to outsource your service desk? Use the above table as a sample.

1.1.2 Document benefits of outsourcing your service desk

1 hour

1. Review the challenges with your current service desk identified in activity 1.1.1.
2. Discuss possible ways to tackle these challenges. Be specific and determine ways to resolve these issues if you were to do it internally.
3. Determine potential benefits of outsourcing the service desk to IT, business, and end users.
4. For each benefit, describe dependencies. For instance, to reduce the number of direct calls (benefit), users should have access to service desk as a single point of contact (dependency).
5. Document this activity in the Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter Template.

Download the Project Charter Template

Input

• List of challenges with the current service desk from activity 1.1.1

Output

• Benefits of outsourcing the service desk

Materials

• Whiteboard/flip charts
• Markers
• Sticky notes
• Laptops

Participants

• IT Director/CIO
• Service Desk Manager
• Service Desk Team
• IT Managers

Why should you not consider cost reduction as a primary incentive to outsourcing the service desk?

Assume that some of the costs will not go away with outsourcing

When you outsource, the vendor's staff tend to gradually become less effective as:

• They are managed by metrics to reduce costs by escalating sooner, reducing talk time, and proposing questionable solutions.
• Turnover results in new employees that get insufficient training.

You must actively manage the vendor to identify and resolve these issues. Many organizations find that service desk management takes more time after they outsource.

You need to keep spending on service desk management, and you may not get away from technology infrastructure spending.

Info-Tech Insight

In their first year, almost 42% of Info-Tech's clients do not get the real value of outsourcing services as expected. This iss primarily because of misalignment of organizational goals with outcomes of the outsourced services.

Consider the hidden costs of outsourcing

Determine strategies to avoid each hidden cost

Your outsourcing strategy should address the reasons you decided to outsource

A clear vision of strategic objectives prior to entering an outsourcing agreement will allow you to clearly communicate these objectives to the Managed Service Provider (MSP) and use them as a contracted basis for the relationship.

• Define the business' overall approach to outsourcing along with the priorities, rules, and principles that will drive the outsourcing strategy and every subsequent outsourcing decision and activity.
• Define specific business, service, and technical goals for the outsourcing project and relevant measures of success.

"People often don't have a clear direction around what they're trying to accomplish. The strategic goals should be documented. Is this a cost-savings exercise? Is it because you're deficient in one area? Is it because you don't have the tools or expertise to run the service desk yourself? Figure out what problem you're trying to solve by outsourcing, then build your strategy around that.
– Jeremy Gagne, Application Support Delivery Manager, Allegis Group

Most organizations are driven to consider outsourcing their service desk hoping to improve the following:

• Ability to scale (train people and acquire skills)
• Focus on core competencies
• Decrease capital costs
• Access latest technology without large investment
• Resolve labor force constraints
• Gain access to special expertise without paying a full salary
• Save money overall

Info-Tech Insight

Use your goals and objectives as a management tool. Clearly outline your desired project outcomes to both your in-house team and the vendor during implementation and monitoring. It will allow a common ground to unite both parties as the project progresses.

Mitigate pitfalls that lay in the way of desired outcomes of outsourcing

1.1.3 Identify outsourcing vision and goals

Identify the goals and objectives of outsourcing to inform your strategy.

Participants: IT Director, Service Desk Manager, Service Desk Team

1-2 hours

1. Meet with key business stakeholders and the service desk staff who were involved in the decision to outsource.
2. As a group, review the results from activity 1.1.1 (challenges with current service desk operations) and identify the goals and objectives of the outsourcing initiative.
3. Determine the key performance indicator (KPI) for each goal.
4. Identify the impacted stakeholder/s for each goal.
5. Discuss checkpoint schedule for each goal to make sure the list stays updated.

Use the sample table as a starting point:

1. Document your table in the Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter Template.

Download the Project Charter Template

Evaluate organizational demographics to assess outsourcing rationale

The size, complexity, and maturity of your organization are good indicators of service desk direction with regards to outsourcing.

Organization Size

• As more devices, applications, systems, and users are added to the mix, vendor costs will increase but their ability to meet business needs will decrease.
• Small organizations are often either rejected by vendors for being too small or locked into a contract that is overkill for their actual needs (and budget).

Complexity

• Highly customized environments and organizations with specialized applications or stringent regulatory requirements are very difficult to outsource for a reasonable cost and acceptable quality.
• In these cases, the vendor is required to train skilled support or ends up escalating more tickets back to second- and third-level support.

Requirements

• Organizations looking to outsource must have defined outsourcing requirements before looking at vendors.
• Without a requirement assessment, the vendor won't have guidelines to follow and you won't be able to measure their adherence.

Info-Tech Insight

Although less adherence to service desk best practices can be one of the main incentives to outsourcing the service desk, IT should have minimal processes in place to be able to set expectations with targeting vendors.

1.1.4 Prioritize service desk outsourcing goals to help structure mission statement

0.5-1 hour

The evaluation process for outsourcing the service desk should be done very carefully. Project leaders should make sure they won't panic internal resources and impact their performance through the transition period.

If the outsourcing process is rushed, it will result in poor evaluation, inefficient decision making, and project failure.

1. Refer to results in activity 1.1.3. Discuss the service desk outsourcing goals once again.
2. Brainstorm the most important objectives. Use sticky notes to prioritize the items from the most important to the least important.
3. Edit the order accordingly.

Input

• Project goals from activity 1.1.3

Output

• Prioritized list of outsourcing goals

Materials

• Whiteboard/flip charts
• Markers
• Sticky notes
• Laptops

Participants

• IT Director/CIO
• Service Desk Manager
• Service Desk Team
• IT Managers

Download the Project Charter Template

1.1.5 Craft a mission statement that demonstrates your decision to reach outsourcing objectives

Participants: IT Director, Service Desk Manager

0.5-1 hour

The IT mission statement specifies the function's purpose or reason for being. The mission should guide each day's activities and decisions. The mission statement should use simple and concise terminology and speak loudly and clearly, generating enthusiasm for the organization.

Strong IT mission statements:

• Articulate the IT function's purpose and reason for existence
• Describe what the IT function does to achieve its vision
• Define the customers of the IT function
• Can be described as:
  • Compelling
  • Easy to grasp
  • Sharply focused
  • Inspirational
  • Memorable
  • Concise

Sample mission statements:

• To help fulfill organizational goals, IT has decided to empower business stakeholders with outsourcing the service desk.
• To support efficient IT service provision, better collaboration, and effective communication, [Company Name] has decided to outsource the service desk.
• [Company Name] plans to outsource the service desk so it can identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies with current service desk processes and enable [Company Name] to innovate and support business growth.

• Considering the goals and benefits determined in the previous activities, outline a mission statement.
• Document your outsourcing mission statement in the "Project Overview" section of the Project Charter Template.

Download the Project Charter Template

Step 1.2

Assess outsourcing feasibility

Activities

1.2.1 Create a baseline of customer experience

1.2.2 Identify service desk processes to outsource

1.2.3 Design an outsourcing decision matrix for service desk processes and services

1.2.4 Discuss if you need to outsource only service desk or if additional services would benefit from outsourcing too

Define the goal

This step requires the following inputs:

• List of service desk tasks and responsibilities

This step involves the following participants:

• CIO
• IT Leadership
• Service Desk Manager
• Infrastructure Manager

Outcomes of this step

• End-user satisfaction with the service desk
• List of processes and services to outsource

1.2.1 Create a baseline of customer experience

Solicit targeted department feedback on IT's core service capabilities, communications, and business enablement from end users. Use this feedback to assess end-user satisfaction with each service, broken down by department and seniority level.

1. Complete an end-user satisfaction survey to define the current state of your IT services, including service desk (timeliness and effectiveness). With Info-Tech's end-user satisfaction program, an analyst will help you set up the diagnostic and will go through the report with you.
2. Evaluate survey results.
3. Communicate survey results with team leads and discuss the satisfaction rates and comments of the end users.
4. Schedule to launch another survey one year after outsourcing the service desk.
5. Your results will be compared to the following year's results to analyze the overall success/failure of your outsourcing project.

A decrease of business and end-user satisfaction is a big drive to outsourcing the service desk. Conduct a customer service survey to discover your end-user experience prior to and after outsourcing the service desk.

Don't get caught believing common misconceptions: outsourcing doesn't mean sending away all the work

First-time outsourcers often assume they are transferring most of the operations over to the vendor, but this is often not the case.

1. Management of performance, SLAs, and customer satisfaction remain the responsibility of your organization.
2. Service desk outsource vendors provide first-line response. This includes answering the phones, troubleshooting simple problems, and redirecting requests that are more complex.
3. The vendor is often able to provide specialized support for standard applications (and for customized applications if you'll pay for it). However, the desktop support still needs someone onsite, and that service is very expensive to outsource.
4. Tickets that are focused on custom applications and require specialized or advanced support are escalated back to your organization's second- and third-level support teams.

Switching to a vendor won't necessarily improve your service desk maturity

You should have minimal requirements before moving.

Whether managing in-house or outsourcing, it is your job to ensure core issues have been clarified, processes defined, and standards maintained. If your processes are ad-hoc or non-existent right now, outsourcing won't fix them.

You must have the following in place before looking to outsource:

• Defined reporting needs and plans
• Formalized skill-set requirements
• Problem management and escalation guidelines
• Ticket templates and classification rules
• Workflow details
• Knowledge base standards

Info-Tech Insight

If you expect your problems to disappear with outsourcing, they might just get worse.

Define long-term requirements

Anticipate growth throughout the lifecycle of your outsourcing contract and build that into the RFP

• Most outsourcing agreements typically last three to five years. In that time, you risk outgrowing your service provider by neglecting to define your long-term service desk requirements.
• Outgrowing your vendor before your contract ends can be expensive due to high switching costs. Managing multiple vendors can also be problematic.
• It is crucial to define your service desk requirements before developing a request for proposal to make sure the service you select can meet your organization's needs.
• Make sure that the business is involved in this planning stage, as the goals of IT need to scale with the growth strategy of the business. You may select a vendor with no additional capacity despite the fact that your organization has a major expansion planned to begin two years from now. Assessing future requirements also allows you to culture match with the vendor. If your outlooks and practices are similar, the match will likely click.

Info-Tech Insight

Don't select a vendor for what your company is today – select a vendor for what your company will be years from now. Define your future service desk requirements in addition to your current requirements and leave room for growth and development.

You can't outsource everything

Manage the things that stay in-house well or suffer the consequences.

Info-Tech Insight

The need for a Service Desk Manager does not go away when you outsource. In fact, the need becomes even stronger and never diminishes.

Assess current service desk processes before outsourcing

Process standards with areas such as documentation, workflow, and ticket escalation should be in place before the decision to outsource has been made.

Every effective service desk has a clear definition of the services that they are performing for the end user. You can't provide a service without knowing what the services are.

MSPs typically have their own set of standards and processes in play. If your service desk is not at a similar level of maturity, outsourcing will not be pleasant.

Make sure that your metrics are reported consistently and that they tell a story.

"Establish baseline before outsourcing. Those organizations that don't have enough service desk maturity before outsourcing should work with the outsourcer to establish the baseline."
– Yev Khobrenkov, Enterprise Consultant, Solvera Solutions

Info-Tech Insight

Outsourcing vendors are not service desk builders; they're service desk refiners. Switching to a vendor won't improve your maturity; you must have a certain degree of process maturity and standardization before moving.

Case Study

INDUSTRY: Cleaning Supplies

SOURCE: PicNet

Challenge

• Reckitt Benckiser of Australia determined that its core service desk needed to be outsourced.
• It would retain its higher level service desk staff to work on strategic projects.
• The MSP needed to fulfill key requirements outlined by Reckitt Benckiser.

Solution

• Reckitt Benckiser recognized that its rapidly evolving IT needs required a service desk that could fulfill the following tasks:
• Free up internal IT staff.
• Provide in-depth understanding of business apps.
• Offer efficient, cost-effective support onsite.
• Focus on continual service improvement (CSI).

Results

• An RFP was developed to support the outsourcing strategy.
• With the project structure outlined and the requirements of the vendor for the business identified, Reckitt Benckiser could now focus on selecting a vendor that met its needs.

1.2.1 Identify service desk processes to outsource

2-3 hours

Review your prioritized project goals from activity 1.1.4.

Brainstorm requirements and use cases for each goal and describe each use case. For example: To improve service desk timeliness, IT should improve incident management, to resolve incidents according to the defined SLA and based on ticket priority levels.

Discuss if you're outsourcing just incident management or both incident management and request fulfillment. If both, determine what level of service requests will be outsourced? Will you ask the vendor to provide a service catalog? Will you outsource self-serve and automation?

Document your findings in the service desk outsourcing requirements database library.

Input

• Outsourcing project goals from activity 1.1.4

Output

• List of processes to outsource

Materials

• Sticky notes
• Markers
• Whiteboard/flip charts
• Laptops

Participants

• IT Director/CIO
• Service Desk Manager
• Service Desk Team

Download the Requirements Database Library

1.2.2 Design an outsourcing decision matrix for service desk processes and services

Participants: IT Director, Service Desk Manager, Infrastructure manager

2-3 hours

Most successful service desk outsourcing engagements have a primary goal of freeing up their internal resources to work on complex tasks and projects. The key outsourcing success factor is to find out internal services and processes that are standardized or should be standardized, and then determine if they can be outsourced.

1. Review the list of identified service desk processes from activity 1.2.1.
2. Discuss the maturity level of each process (low, medium, high) and document under the maturity column of the Outsource the Service Desk Requirements Database Library.
3. Use the following decision matrix for each process. Discuss which tasks are important to strategic objectives, which ones provide competitive advantage, and which ones require specialized in-house knowledge.
4. Identify processes that receive high vendor's performance advantage. For instance, access to talent, lower cost at scale, and access to technology.
5. In your outsourcing assessment, consider a narrow scope of engagement and a broad view of what is important to business outcome.
6. Based on your findings, determine the priority of each process to be outsourced. Document results in the service desk outsourcing requirements database library, and section 4.1 of the service desk outsourcing project charter.

Download the Requirements Database Library

Download the Project Charter Template

Maintain staff and training: you need to know who is being hired, how, and why

Define documentation rules to retain knowledge

• Establish a standard knowledge article template and list of required information.
• Train staff on the requirements of knowledge base creation and management. Help them understand the value of the time spent recording their work.
• It is your responsibility to assure the quality of each knowledge article. Outline accountabilities for internal staff and track for performance evaluations.

For information on better knowledge management, refer to Info-Tech's blueprint Optimize the Service Desk With a Shift-Left Strategy.

Expect to manage stringent skills and training standards

• Plan on being more formal about a Service Manager position and spending more time than you allocated previously.
• Complete a thorough assessment of the skills you need to keep the service desk running smoothly.
• Don't forget to account for any customized or proprietary systems. How will you train vendor staff to accommodate your needs? What does their turnaround look like: would it be more likely that you acquire a dependable employee in-house?
• Staffing requirements need to be actively monitored to ensure the outsourcer doesn't have degradation of quality or hiring standards. Don't assume that things run well – complete regular checks and ask for access to audit results.
• Are the systems and data being accessed by the vendor highly sensitive or subject to regulatory requirements? If so, it is your job to ensure that vendor staff are being screened appropriately.

Does your service desk need to integrate to other IT services?

A common challenge when outsourcing multiple services to more than one vendor is a lack of collaboration and communication between vendors.

• Leverage SIAM capabilities to integrate service desk tasks to other IT services, if needed.
• "Service Integration and Management (SIAM) is a management methodology that can be applied in an environment that includes services sourced from a number of service providers" (Scopism Limited, 2020).
• SIAM supports cross-functional integrations. Organizations that look for a single provider will be less likely to get maximum benefits from SIAM.

There are three layers of entities in SIAM:

• Customer Organization: The customer who receives services, who defines the relationship with service providers.
• Service Integrator: End-to-end service governance and integration is done at this layer, making sure all service providers are committed to their services.
• Service Provider: Responsible party for service delivery according to contract. It can be combination of internal provider, managed by internal agreements, and external provider, managed by SLAs between providers and customer organization.

Use SIAM to obtain better results from multiple service providers

In the SIAM model, the customer organization keeps strategic, governance, and business activities, while integrating other services (either internally or externally).

SIAM Layers. Source: SIAM Foundation BoK

Utilize SIAM to obtain better results from multiple service providers

SIAM reduces service duplication and improves service delivery via managing internal and external service providers.

To utilize the SIAM model, determine the following components:

• Service providers
• Service consumers
• Service outcomes
• Service obstacles and boundaries
• Service dependencies
• Technical requirements and interactions for each service
• Service data and information including service levels

To learn more about adopting SIAM, visit Scopism.

1.2.3 Discuss if you need to outsource only service desk or if additional services would benefit from outsourcing too

1-2 hours

• Discuss principles and goals of SIAM and how integrating other services can apply within your processes.
• Review the list of service desk processes and tasks to be outsourced from activities 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
• Brainstorm a list of other services that are outsourced/need to be outsourced.
• Determine providers of each service (both internal and external). Document the other services to be integrated in the project charter template and requirements database library.

Input

• SIAM objectives
• List of service desk processes to outsource

Output

• List of other services to outsource and integrate in the project

Materials

• Sticky notes
• Markers
• Whiteboard/flip charts
• Laptops

Participants

• IT Director/CIO
• Service Desk Manager
• Service Desk Team

Download the Requirements Database Library

Download the Project Charter Template

Establish requirements for problem management in the outsourcing plan

Your MSP should not just fulfill SLAs – they should be a proactive source of value.

Problem management is a group effort. Make sure your internal team is assisted with sufficient and efficient data by the outsourcer to conduct a better problem management.

Clearly state your organization's expectations for enabling problem management. MSPs may not necessarily need, and cannot do, problem management; however, they should provide metrics to help you discover trends, define recurring issues, and enable root cause analysis.

For more information on problem management, refer to Info-Tech's blueprint Improve Incident and Problem Management.

PROBLEM MANAGEMENT

INCIDENT MANAGEMENT

INTAKE: Ticket data from incident management is needed for incident matching to identify problems. Critical Incidents are also a main input to problem management.

EVENT MANAGEMENT

INTAKE: SMEs and operations teams monitoring system health events can identify indicators of potential future issues before they become incidents.

APPLICATION, INFRASTRUCTURE, and SECURITY TEAMS

ACTION: Problem tickets require investigation from relevant SMEs across different IT teams to identify potential solutions or workarounds.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT

OUTPUT: Problem resolution may need to go through Change Management for proper authorization and risk management.

Outline problem management protocols to gain value from your service provider

• For example, with a deep dive into ticket trend analysis, your MSP should be able to tell you that you've had a large number of tickets on a particular issue in the past month, allowing you to look into means to resolve the issue and prevent it from reoccurring.
• A proactive MSP should be able to help your service levels improve over time. This should be built into the KPIs and metrics you ask for from the outsourcer.

Sample Scenario

Your MSP tracks ticket volume by platform.

There are 100 network tickets/month, 200 systems tickets/month, and 5,000 end-user tickets/month.

Tracking these numbers is a good start, but the real value is in the analysis. Why are there 5,000 end-user tickets? What are the trends?

Your MSP should be providing a monthly root-cause analysis to help improve service quality.

Outcomes:

1. Meeting basic SLAs tells a small part of the story. The MSP is performing well in a functional sense, but this doesn't shed any insight on what kind of knowledge or value is being added.
2. The MSP should provide routine updates on ticket trends and other insights gained through data analysis.
3. A commitment to continual improvement will provide your organization with value throughout the duration of the outsourcing agreement.

Phase 2

Design an Outsourcing Strategy

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• Identify roles and responsibilities
• Determine potential risks of outsourcing the service desk
• Build a list of metrics

This phase involves the following participants:

• Service Desk Team
• IT Leadership

Define requirements for outsourcing service desk support

Step 2.1

Identify project stakeholders

Activity

2.1.1 Identify internal outsourcing roles and responsibilities

Design an Outsourcing Strategy

This step requires the following inputs:

• List of service desk roles
• Service desk outsourcing goals

This step involves the following participants:

• IT Managers
• Project Team
• Service Desk Manager

Outcome of this step

• Outsourcing roles and responsibilities

Design an outsourcing strategy to capture the vision of your service desk

An outsourcing strategy is crucial to the proper accomplishment of an outsourcing project. By taking the time to think through your strategy beforehand, you will have a clear idea of your desired outcomes. This will make your RFP of higher quality and will result in a much easier negotiation process.

Most MSPs are prepared to offer a standard proposal to clients who do not know what they want. These are agreements that are doomed to fail. A clearly defined set of goals (discussed in Phase 1), risks, and KPIs and metrics (covered in this phase) makes the agreement more beneficial for both parties in the long run.

1. Identify goals and objectives
2. Determine mission statement
3. Define roles and responsibilities
4. Identify risks and constraints
5. Define KPIs and metrics
6. Complete outsourcing strategy

A successful outsourcing initiative depends on rigorous preparation

Outsourcing is a garbage in, garbage out initiative. You need to give your service provider the information they need to provide an effective product.

• Data quality is critical to your outsourcing initiative's success.
• Your vendor will be much better equipped to help you and to better price its services if it has a thorough understanding of your IT environment.
• This means more than just building a catalog of your hardware and software. You will need to make available documented policies and processes so you and your vendor can understand where they fit in.
• Failure to completely document your environment can lead to a much longer time to value as your provider will have to spend much more time (and thus much more money) getting their service up and running.

"You should fill the gap before outsourcing. You should make sure how to measure tickets, how to categorize, and what the cost of outsourcing will be. Then you'll be able to outsource the execution of the service. Start your own processes and then outsource their execution."
– Kris Krishan, Head of IT and business systems, Waymo

Case Study

Digital media company built an outsourcing strategy to improve customer satisfaction

INDUSTRY: Digital Media

SOURCE: Auxis

Challenge

A Canadian multi-business company with over 13,000 employees would like to maintain a growing volume of digital content with their endpoint management.

The client operated a tiered model service desk. Tier 1 was outsourced, and tier 2 tasks were done internally, for more complex tasks and projects.

As a result of poor planning and defining goals, the company had issues with:

• Low-quality ticket handling
• High volume of tickets escalated to tier 2, restraining them from working on complex tickets
• High turn over and a challenge with talent retention
• Insufficient documentation to train external tier 1 team
• Long resolution time and low end-user satisfaction

Solution

The company structured a strategy for outsourcing service desk and defined their expectations and requirements.

They engaged with another outsourcer that would fulfill their requirements as planned.

With the help of the outsourcer's consulting team, the client was able to define the gaps in their existing processes and system to:

• Implement a better ticketing system that could follow best-practices guidelines
• Restructure the team so they would be able to handle processes efficiently

Results

The proactive planning led to:

• Significant improvement in first call resolution (82%).
• MTTR improvement freed tier 2 to focus on business strategic objectives and allowed them to work on higher-value activities.
• With a better strategy around outsourcing planning, the company saved 20% of cost compared to the previous outsourcer.
• As a result of this partnership, the company is providing a 24/7 structure in multiple languages, which is aligned with the company's growth.
• Due to having a clear strategy built for the project, the client now has better visibility into metrics that support long-term continual improvement plans.

Define roles and responsibilities for the outsourcing transition to form the base of your outsourcing strategy

There is no "I" in outsource; make sure the whole team is involved

Outsourcing is a complete top-to-bottom process that involves multiple levels of engagement:

• Management must make high-level decisions about staffing and negotiate contract details with the vendor.
• Service desk employees must execute on the documentation and standardization of processes in an effort to increase maturity.
• Roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined to ensure that all aspects of the transition are completed on time.
• Implement a full-scale effort that involves all relevant staff. The most common mistake is to have the project design follow the same top-down pattern as the decision-making process.

Info-Tech Insight

The service desk doesn't operate in isolation. The service desk interfaces with many other parts of the organization (such as finance, purchasing, field support, etc.), so it's important to ensure you engage stakeholders from other departments as well. If you only engage the service desk staff in your discussions around outsourcing strategy and RFP development, you may miss requirements that will come up when it's too late.

2.1.1 Identify internal outsourcing roles and responsibilities

2 hours

1. The sample RACI chart in section 5 of the Project Charter Template outlines which positions are responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed for each major task within the outsourcing project.
2. Responsible, is the group that is responsible for the execution and oversight of activities for the project. Accountable is the owner of the task/process, who is accountable for the results and outcomes. Consulted is the subject matter expert (SME) who is actively involved in the task/process and consulted on decisions. Informed is not actively involved with the task/process and is updated about decisions around the task/process.
3. Make sure that you assign only one person as accountable per process. There can be multiple people responsible for each task. Consulted and Informed are optional for each task.
4. Complete the RACI chart with recommended participants, and document in your service desk outsourcing project charter, under section 5.

Input

• RACI template
• Org chart

Output

• List of roles and responsibilities for outsource project

Materials

• Whiteboard/flip charts
• Markers
• Laptops

Participants

• IT Director/CIO
• Service Desk Manager
• Service Desk Team

Download the Project Charter Template

Step 2.2

Outline potential risks and constraints

Activities

2.2.1 Identify potential risks and constraints that may impact achievement of objectives

2.2.2 Arrange groups of tension metrics to balance your reporting

Design an Outsourcing Strategy