Gartner: Why Business Relationship Management Is Essential for Smarter Government Strategies?
By Ben Kaner
In an era marked by technological advancements and ever-evolving challenges, it is crucial for governments to adopt strategies that drive efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation. Government chief information officers (CIOs) and chief development officers (CDOs) often face difficulty building convincing strategies due to the complexity of government, leading to challenges in elucidating a distinct mission or business strategy.
Business relationship management (BRM) is a vital element in the establishment and connection of strategies necessary for the efficient operation of government organizations. Gartner defines BRM as the art of delivering business capabilities to further organizational goals, while managing business partner expectations of what IT can deliver.
Creating Mature BRM Capabilities
It is common for the importance of BRM to be undervalued, which makes it harder to understand customer needs and therefore difficult for IT to contribute strategically.
To stay informed of customer needs and become better at providing value, IT must proactively engage in more formal engagement and input processes than simply reacting to lagging indicators such as trouble tickets, project requests, funding requests made to finance, etc. Mature BRM functions help to deduce mission strategies and increase communication with customers. While many government IT organizations claim to have BRM capability, there is a wide disparity in the maturity and effectiveness of these organizations.
Within a BRM team, a relationship manager (RM) has three distinct roles to play, depending on the different levels of maturity of the BRM function. RMs are predominantly order takers at the first stage, where they are expected to solve problems or address the needs of the internal customers.
RMs act as a broker at the second stage, where they understand assigned customers’ current and ongoing needs, represent these needs back to the IT organization, and facilitate the resolution of demand for, and supply of, IT products and services.
At the third stage, the RM’s role is that of a strategic contributor who focuses on the business outcomes of their customers by actively shaping demand.
The success of relationship management is dependent upon a calculated approach and an appreciation of the numerous facets to the RM role. Governments must take caution to not simply deploy RMs who act as advocates for the business back into IT without first creating the organizational capability to respond to problems, issues and demands. Effective BRM is empowered with a voice inside the IT organization to help ensure that IT is working on the right challenges.
BRM is a vital component of demonstrating and communicating the value of IT and understanding the strategic needs of the customers. Once those needs are clearly understood, creating an I&T strategy and explaining why an investment in the strategy is needed, is much easier to do among mission leaders.
Additional analysis on effective government decision-making will be presented during Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2023, Kochi, November 28-30.
(The author is Ben Kaner, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, and the views expressed in this article are his own)
