Moving from IT issue management to Business issue management

I remember the story of a Father & Son that Leadership advisor, Robin Sharma, narrates in his leadership talk. In this story, the kid was constantly troubling his father for attention while the father was reading a newspaper. The father gets an idea and he tears one part of paper in small pieces with a picture of a globe on it and asks his son to fix it assuming that it will keep him engaged for some time. The son came back almost immediately with the solution and the father was surprised to see his son coming back so soon. Father asked his son how did he do it? The son replied that there was a picture of a man behind the paper. Once the man was put in place, the world was OK.

How true is this case when applying in Application Production Support context? Most of the times we are constantly engaged in setting the World together, finding it difficult to join pieces and spending more time figuring it out. We miss the simpler picture of the Business flow / knowledge. Once you get the basics of business correct, the support solution should always be ok and effective.    

That brings us to deliberate on the significance of the business knowledge in the IT support. Debating on why it makes sense to move from IT issue management to Business issue management.

In my earlier blogs, I discussed about the frameworks that you can build to bring the business focus into the Application support environment. The foundation built for this framework should provide inputs for this movement from IT issue management to Business issue management.

Here are few guidelines:

1.      Focus on understanding the requirement from business perspective. Once you understand the business flow, being a techie you should be able to figure out the cause and the solution.

2.      Build a foundation early in the engagement for identifying the business impact. Once you understand the business impact, you will be able to prioritize the work more efficiently.

3.      It helps in how you report the issues (Business focused) – if larger audience can understand the reports you have produced, you are more likely to get improvement solutions from different organizations. All helping you to resolve a business issue than the IT instance you would have generally should you have looked it as an IT issue.

4.      Validate all your understanding with business. Your solution and reports will be more precise if you have validated your understanding from the business.   

 

Focusing on business issue will create that synergy with the business or operations and you will be able to build that level playing, data driven decision making platform, which will also enable Business Alignment in your engagements.