Risk Management

Communication is not an IT Issue

IT is responsible for creating the avenues of communication (in a technology sense) work. This often makes them the target of some frustrated customers when something goes wrong. This blog post by Wayne Turmel is an open call to CIOs and to other business leaders to recall who (or what) is to blame: it’s your processes and procedures, not your IT staff.

For instance: are you providing best practices to your employees on how to save, organize, and utilize the company email system? This isn’t the responsibility of your IT staff, it’s the responsibility of you, the leader.

Turmel goes on to list other situations where IT is called to the carpet:

It’s tempting, and oh so very easy, to blame IT for communication problems on your team. The VPN that keeps dropping and slows everything to a crawl? That’s on their consciences. The seventeen passwords that you can’t remember and keep changing? That’s them again. The fact that your team won’t use the internal file sharing sites? OOOOOPS.

Remember, data transfer is IT’s job. Making sure that it’s used to truly communicate and connect is the job of every individual team member and leader. There’s enough blame to go around, let’s just place it on the right shoulders.

So how can IT help in situations like this? Well, it’s possible of course to tap IT to provide training on the products they help install ““ but even that will only go so far. Leaders need to provide the training and support for their employees to use the applications and services correctly ““ and spare a few dozen angry emails to IT.

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