When I joined Iron Mountain a year ago, the organization was deeply dependent on a number of strategic vendors, which hampered our ability to be responsive to the needs of our internal and external partners.
To reverse this, we’re working today to rationalize and reduce the number of our current vendors so the ones that remain are truly strategic partners who understand our business and processes. Essential to this process is working with our business partners to identify what we call “core to the core” – in other words, the processes and technologies that differentiate Iron Mountain in the eyes of our customers and competitors.
Developing a partnership with recognized business executives and stakeholders is necessary for identifying what’s core to the core. You need to engage each other in a rich dialogue to help each other understand the company’s strategy, what differentiates it, and what the company uses as leverage against their competitors.
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IT has a point of view in all of this and can help to facilitate those conversations with business stakeholders. I think those conversations need to be deliberate because they’re initiating a level of rich dialogue that may not have occurred in the past.
Build out your roadmap
One method I’ve used to facilitate this discussion is a capability map, which the IT service owner and the business stakeholder use to identify the major steps or process areas relative to those foundational end-to-end processes. This helps to identify the technologies that are currently in place that support or enable that particular step, and the points of integration across that end-to-end business process.
Once you have agreement with the business stakeholders, then perform a health check on the technologies and technical capabilities that enable those end-to-end business processes. I use a simple color code of red, yellow, and green, to depict the relative health and maturity of those solutions.
These tactics have helped us uncover our areas of differentiation. They also help the IT leadership team identify potential risks in supporting and enabling those business processes, which helps to inform our multi-year roadmap from staffing, skillset, budget, and technology perspectives.
Focusing less on technology from the start has enabled collaborative, healthy conversation. It has ensured that everyone understands the business process gaps, opportunities, and the types of disruptive change that are feasible to introduce.
Lessons for the future
I recommend doing this end-to-end mapping as early in your tenure as possible. The outcomes should inform the determination of IT’s strategic partners and core platforms. It’s critical to reach a common understanding and agreement with the business stakeholders regarding what’s truly core-to-the-core, then align staffing and operating models that best meet the highest priority areas – based on risk or strategic capability gaps.
IT’s role in identifying what’s core-to-the-core reinforces that we’re more than just a deliverer of technology. When our business stakeholders see us engaging in this type of consultative dialogue, they better understand that we’re thinking about business process, business capabilities, and business value.
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