Peter Drucker wrote that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. But it’s not as simple as that. In the Digital Workplace, the question isn’t whether you measure, but what you measure. And, of course, who cares.
Perspective is everything
For decades, we in IT have been measuring what we care about, and trying to find a way to make that matter. Too often, the response from our business partners is “so what?!”. We say we’ve hit over 96% uptime, or less than 1% packet loss on our conferencing tool; the business will say we just lost them a sale because it was too hard to use.
You’ll hear comments like my team is frustrated, confused, slowed down, and so on. Highly qualitative, highly emotive, but not always quantified into a hard metric. From our perspective, they’re just complaining. From their perspective, IT just doesn’t get it. So how do we bridge the gap?
Three Steps to Success
- Try to put yourself in the shoes of your business partner: empathise. Listen to what matters to them. Speak in their language.
- Ask, listen to & learn from their employees. Use tools like IT Pulse Surveys and Employee Personas to gather sentiment data and anecdotal responses in volume so that you can get data in context.
- Share this data with the business every quarter and demonstrate that you have listened and can set targets around what matters to them.
As in every relationship, listening is critical. Our business partners need to be listened to. Capturing the metrics that matter to them is a vital first step towards powering the Digital Workplace.
