by Vincent Gaudio
As any
Alliant employee or customer will tell you, our passion for technology runs
through our company like electricity, powering our services 24/7. Although names and faces sometimes change as
with any organization, the current continues to flow not only internally, but
to our customers, who are an extension of our team. With each passing year at Alliant, I gain
more and more insight into how this intangible yet powerful force is
generated. Though the generator is
complex and multi-faceted, it is powered by us, the members of the
organization.
This week our
executive management team held a Continuous Infrastructure Service™ (CIS) training session, and there was a lot of emphasis
placed on inter-department synergy. Not only
in a technology organization, but in any organization, synergy between members
is paramount and vital for success. For
the sake of scalability, an organization must naturally be departmentalized as
it grows. This is absolutely necessary;
however, as the resultant groups of people’s functions are divided and
subdivided logically, they tend to become divided in additional ways that can
be detrimental to the overall mechanics of the group. As a long-time member of the Alliant Managed
Services team, I have learned the importance of every facet of an organization
being in concert with each other in order to drive success. This is a methodology that is often touted but
rarely practiced.
Communication Lubrication
Each
department is like a gear, and each member is a tooth. Communication is the grease which is now
easier than ever to apply to your own organization. Whether your employees’ departments
communicate via the Cisco Unified Communications suite, Webex Connect IM, Microsoft Office 365, or walk across the aisle and have a verbal
exchange, coordination and collaboration are key. The more collaboration methods put at your
various teams’ disposal, the better.
Using Cisco Webex technology, our engineers are transported in minutes
to the core of any network, increasing productivity and executing unparalleled
time to repair. Executives can arrange
meetings with participants around the world from their own office in a matter
of minutes, and all of the invitees can be present minutes later. The same power can and should be used internally
in your organization to bring inter-department communications to new
heights. Regardless of the products and
services you bring to the market daily, all facets of your organization should
always be talking about them and sparking new ideas around them. No member of an organization can know too much
about its products or services, and all members should be open and willing to
seeing them from multiple angles. This
mindset drives passion and motivation, and passion and motivation drive this
mindset. This cycle is imperative to
success. “Sales training” sessions are a
popular method for businesses to facilitate this type of communication and
cross-training around their commodities.
I find that at Alliant, these types of get-togethers are much more productive
than they are elsewhere, because the sales teams are not the only ones who
learn in them. We can and should all
learn from each other constantly. Members
of our various other teams, such as marketing and sales operations, and even
our CEO appear at these meetings and everyone involved contributes to
accelerating the collaborative process that drives our success.
Util-IT
Why are
organizations prone to poor inter-department communication as they grow? Human
nature. How has Alliant sustained, and
even improved excellent inter-departmental collaboration as it grows? One part of the answer is in how our business
is organized. Using the ITIL framework
we are continuously streamlining via tried and true processes and procedures,
which helps to drive our pre-existing collaborative mentality. This lends
additional benefit and versatility to our various departments, as opposed to simply
dividing them by function for scale. Part
two of the answer returns us to the “departments as gears,” metaphor. Most businesses are driving communication
between their various teams solely based on a set, repeatable, documented
framework. All of their gears may spin
efficiently and at high speeds, which is great.
At Alliant the magic comes from the gears’ axles moving as well, causing
them to make contact with all of the other gears around them. This
difficult-to-engineer motion extends out to our customers.
Constant
communication and collaboration is a cultural aspect that has always helped to
power Alliant and keeps our customers’ services powered 365 days a year. It is now playing a major role in putting us
on the leading edge of utility IT via our CIS offerings. We urge you to encourage the same habit in
your organization, regardless of your role.
