If your CEO were to round a corner and suddenly drop a question or concern in your lap, would your first instinct be to look for a human shield–perhaps in the form of your IT Manager, Director, or CIO? Or do you have someone on your IT team who might just make matters worse if they were exposed to executive interrogation?
Especially when things have gone wobbly or worse, there’s a real risk that your IT team’s talent and often heroic efforts may be communicated poorly. And we all know that this can have serious implications in real-time, as well as downstream.
Right away, an encounter gone wrong will blow back to your IT leadership. He or she will have to expend time and energy when there’s little to spare.
But weeks or months after the typical crisis is resolved, unproductive interactions between business leaders and IT can come back to haunt the whole team. As I mentioned in my Top 10 Takeaways from Gartner Datacenter Conference post, “not being seen as strategic” is a significant blocker to IT contributing to business innovation.
Without everyone on your IT team pursuing an MBA during evenings and weekends, is there a shortcut method? Some way to bridge the gap between the worlds of executives and IT staff, especially in the moments that count? An approach that can be used “on the fly” after either individual prep or (even better) a quick IT team lunch-and learn? In short, yes there is.
Zenoss has put it in a brief eBook for you, because we see IT getting short-changed day-in and day-out, and we know our economy could be in much better shape if business leaders could see IT in a more strategic light, and invest in IT with an eye toward innovation–and not just a cost center.
In the eBook you’ll find:
- 5 specific IT incident management scenarios in various industries
- The questions that IT can expect executives will ask (and the thinking behind them), plus
- 2 paths to answering these questions, with side-by-side comparisons of the responses
- And–overall–a free & portable conversation starter for getting IT staff and their business counterparts aligned and communicating more productively together
So download the eBook today and be prepared to engage in more strategic discussions next week.
