Business Relationship Managers and IT Strategy

The "soft" side of change has challenged higher education IT departments for years. Seeking a solution, IT leaders have increasingly turned to business relationship managers (BRMs), who can bring IT supply and demand together by bi-directionally educating IT leadership and the rest of the university.

BRMs, also found in other industries, can improve your university's relationship with technology. This article combines first-hand experience, research, and an interview with Purdue University's first IT relationship manager, who has over 20 years of higher education experience and transitioned to the BRM role in 2015. The college IT unit where she's embedded continues to grow, hiring a second BRM because building effective relationships must occur on a small scale — it is not possible to have close, productive relationships with the 300+ faculty in the college.

What Does a BRM Do?

A BRM can end redundant systems and rampant project failure. They can make the difference between the institution putting urgent, unexpected demands on the IT unit and a well-ordered IT spend portfolio with a manageable load of urgent projects. They can also help transform an isolated IT department into a dynamic partner with the rest of the university.

How do they do it? They increase IT-business alignment (hereafter simply alignment) by increasing interdepartmental communication, formal interaction (such as joint planning sessions), and shared domain knowledge. They increase IT agility by improving the quality of the IT project portfolio, ensuring an appropriate balance of urgent projects and emerging technology research. They shape demand rather than expecting the IT unit to passively accept any project tossed its way. Rather than agreeing with what executives and faculty say they want from technology, BRMs can help educate executives and faculty to want what they really need from technology.

According to surveys, alignment and agility have been the top two managerial concerns of IT executives since the global recession in 2008.¹ A review of alignment literature shows three major contributors to alignment:

• Communication: Communication is necessary for joint planning and collaboration and important for developing a shared language — an antecedent for CIO success.In one study, it was the most important factor for CIO satisfaction as well.²
• Formal Interaction: Informal interaction does not necessarily contribute to shared domain knowledge, but there have been calls for collaboration at all levels of the organization in order for alignment to occur. The more common call is for formal interaction in the form of collaborating on strategic planning. Planning sophistication, or better formal interaction, contributes to shared domain knowledge.³
• Shared Domain Knowledge: Identified as a major part of the social dimension of alignment, shared domain knowledge — together with shared language — contributes to alignment. Large numbers of studies have worked to determine whether IT knowledge of the business is important and, if so, if it is more important than a business manager's knowledge of IT and vice versa. Those results are mixed, but invariably at least some form of shared domain knowledge is important.⁴

We mention both alignment and agility because not only are they two of the biggest concerns for IT executives, but it is possible that agility mediates alignment.⁵ The actions of an IT BRM must contribute to both alignment and agility to be considered effective. We believe they can.

Purdue’s BRM has increased the potential for engagement of both faculty and the IT staff. She told us, "We have brilliant faculty here hat have great ideas, and they may have things they need IT to do that don't even exist yet." In that situation, the IT department gains knowledge by designing a novel solution, and employees feel more engaged because they work on a unique project. Additionally, the project has the potential for a high return on investment, providing a high-profile success for both the faculty and the IT unit. Helping faculty with their learning, discovery, and engagement activities should foster their commitment to IT.

Bridging the faculty-IT divide requires knowing the competencies BRMs need to accomplish their goals. According to the Business Relationship Management Institute (BRMI), a successful BRM must have the following competencies in:

• Strategic partnering
• Business IQ (knowledge about the organization as a whole and its industry)
• Portfolio management
• Provider domain (in this case, knowledge about IT)
• Business transition management
• Powerful communications

A BRM role would ideally be situated to communicate to both the provider (in this case, IT departments) and their business partners (the rest of the institution). If your college or university's technology affects suppliers as well, you should involve them in those conversations. BRMs must communicate in language appropriate for the receiver, whether avoiding tech terms with the faculty and business team or defining requirements unambiguously for the technical team.

Formal interaction overlaps with strategic partnering and business transition management. Senior executive support, or sponsorship, was identified as the most important enabler of alignment for IT and a top factor for the success of project and change management.⁶ Sponsorship is inextricably linked to business transition management (i.e., value realization). Strategic partnering, if within a single organization, requires identification of individuals who can drive the ideation and development of transformative projects as well as their execution and adoption. The BRM knows which IT projects are common and, because of specialized knowledge, can also act as a strategic partner. Purdue's BRM described her experience with the bi-directionality of knowledge transfer:

"To be able to provide that feedback that says project collaboration is one of the top considerations. If we’re going to be creating a new service, asking faculty what they need out of this, we turn it into a two-way street between the faculty and IT provider, and that’s the goal. […] It becomes a two-way street of understanding what the faculty need long-term so we can begin informing the administration and enterprise IT with the business intelligence we are receiving."

Business IQ, portfolio management, and provider domain fall under the umbrella of shared domain knowledge. As shared domain knowledge increases and communication channels are opened, portfolio management becomes easier because business units recognize their impact on the overall technology health of the university.

Increasing the major factors that contribute to alignment reduces redundancies. For example, in a recent discussion on the role with a BRM at a private university, he explained that in just a few months on the job he uncovered over 20 separate implementations of a web-based customer relationship management system. This resulted in overall inefficiencies because the systems were not interconnected, even though they should have been, as well as added costs in data and licensing fees. With the proper knowledge and communication channels, these situations would never occur. This specific BRM is tasked with not only discovering these disparate licensees but also then coordinating with the organizational unit and IT on the combined implementation, acting as a sort of project overseer.

Small Gains Yield Big Wins

It may sound as if effective BRMs would work themselves out of a job. Only after the entire organization is embedded with knowledge not only of what to communicate but also with whom they should communicate is the BRM no longer needed. Even then, without a BRM, someone in IT must fulfill the functions of a BRM in order to discuss the project details, specifications, and timeline in such a way that the IT department's overall goals are not compromised as a result of a new project. In fact, higher education institutions need BRMs because many faculty have not even considered strategic conversations with IT. According to Purdue's BRM:

"The professors have never considered having that conversation with the other IT individuals. That was a big eye opener for me. It showed me that it doesn't really matter if they are here 2 weeks or 10 months, there are untapped IT services that are beyond the break-fix. The faculty have not known where to start, and for the first time in our college, they have someone that is responsible for their IT experience end-to-end. They don't have to worry about getting bounced around by services, we do the connecting."

These are small gains, but they create big wins because the faculty notice and begin engaging in more and more strategic conversations with IT.

If your IT organization does not have a BRM position, two actions are incumbent on you. First, determine whether professionals within your IT department are already performing the essential functions of a BRM. If yes, but those functions are implicit in nature, they should be made explicit. Then future employees in the same role will know the position's requirements, and you can select appropriate replacements to fulfill the same duties.

Second, if the essential functions of a BRM are not being performed or if making the role explicit unduly increases the volume of work, consider creating the BRM role in your organization. In large universities like Purdue, BRMs need to be embedded at the college level to develop effective relationships. Small colleges and universities may be able to allow BRMs to operate across the institution, or groups of related colleges and departments, due to the lower number of faculty. A key reason came from Purdue's first BRM, who said that when she was well into the transition from operations to BRM, she received an operational request from the division director. In that moment she realized relationship management was a full-time job requiring full-time focus because the role already fully occupied her time and energies.

The BRM position has similarities to change management. If the duties were melded together, then change management professionals would be involved in the beginning of projects as BRMs, shaping the relationship from ideation to adoption. This involvement has major, university-wide advantages for the IT department with BRM staff. If you consider the functional requirements of the BRM role as key competencies for your IT department, your unit's relationship with the rest of the institution will change for the better as your effectiveness and influence grow.

Notes

1. Jerry Luftman, Barry Derksen, Rajeev Dwivedi, Martin Santana, Hossein S. Zadeh, and Eduardo H. Rigoni, "Influential IT Management Trends: An International Study," Journal of Information Technology, Vol. 30, No. 3 (September 2015): 293–305, doi:10.1057/jit.2015.18.
2. Sources for the research on communication: D. S. Preston and E. Karahanna, "Antecedents of IS Strategic Alignment: A Nomological Network," Information Systems Research, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2009): 159–179; Detlev H. Smaltz, V. Sambamurthy, and Ritu Agarwal, "The Antecedents of CIO Role Effectiveness in Organizations: An Empirical Study in the Healthcare Sector," IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2006): 207–222; and Meredith L. Weiss, Information Technology Management in Higher Education: An Evidence-Based Approach to Improving Chief Information Officer Performance, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Doctoral Dissertation (2010).
3. Sources for research on formal interaction: Bruce Campbell, Robert Kay, and David Avison, "Strategic Alignment: A Practitioner's Perspective," Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. 18, No. 6 (2005): 653–664, doi:10.1108/17410390510628364; Albert L. Lederer and Aubrey L. Mendelow, "Coordination of Information Systems Plans with Business Plans,"Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1989): 5–19; Grover S. Kearns and Rajiv Sabherwal, "Strategic Alignment between Business and Information Technology: A Knowledge-Based View of Behaviors, Outcomes, and Consequences," Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2006): 129–162; Alice M. Johnson and Albert L. Lederer, "CEO/CIO Mutual Understanding, Strategic Alignment, and the Contribution of IS to the Organization," Information and Management, 47, (2010): 138–149; and E. E. Chan, Rajiv Sabherwal, and Jason Bennett Thatcher, "Antecedents and Outcomes of Strategic IS Alignment: An Empirical Investigation,"IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Vol. 53, No. 1, (2006): 27–47.
4. Sources for research on shared domain knowledge: David S. Preston and Elena Karahanna, "Antecedents of IS Strategic Alignment: A Nomological Network," Information Systems Research, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2009): 159–179; and Blaize Horner Reich and Izak Benbasat, "Factors That Influence the Social Dimension of Alignment between Business and Information Technology Objectives," Management Information Systems Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2000): 81–113.
5. Paul P. Tallon and Alain Pinsonneault, "Competing Perspectives on the Link Between Strategic Information Technology Alignment and Organizational Agility: Insights from a Mediation Model," MIS Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2011): 463–486.
6. Jerry Luftman, Raymond Papp, and Tom Brier, "Enablers and Inhibitors of Business-IT Alignment," Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1999): 1–33; and Project Management Institute," Executive Engagement: The Role of the Sponsor," white paper (2010).

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Louis Hickman is a PhD student in Purdue Polytechnic Institute.

Doug Foster is associate vice president for IT Application Services and deputy CIO at Purdue.