I love my IT department:

We asked Saskia Smeele, Global IT Quality Manager at Sara Lee, for her opinion on the process of growing love for the IT organisation.

How important is it for your IT organisation to have a good image?

A good image is crucial. It’s the oil that lubricates the machine. If the business feels that it is misunderstood - that IT is an ivory tower, a department that simply decides everything independently - then every step can be a struggle.

What have you done to achieve this?

We’ve introduced a host of initiatives to ensure good alignment with the business. Besides, our outlook makes it clear that we want to offer our organisation best-in-class services and products, and that we want to be the service provider of choice for our organisation. The business IT alignment maturity model is a good starting point to achieve that. For that purpose, we have established:

-   A variety of roles in our organisation with alignment as goal, e.g. Account Managers for the various business tiers within the organisation (short lines) and Quality Managers (Check)

-   Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with our business to outline the starting points/objectives relating to performance (Plan)

-   Measurement moments with reference to the success of our services and products (objective and subjective) (Check)

-   Improvement programmes regarding the feedback on our services and products (Act)

The business is the guiding principle when setting priorities relating to our activities

What would you never do again within this context?

Don’t think: it’s one single audience. One person sees IT as a commodity (‘as long as it works’), while another views the achievement of benefits as crucial. That’s why you have to ensure that you gear the objectives to this and shape the activities around it.

What advice would you give counterpart managers who are still at the start of the transition from ‘I hate...’ to ‘I love my IT department’?

Take a look at the business IT alignment maturity model and use the ‘I love my IT department’ sticker. It really is a fun thing to do!

Sara Lee markets a wide range of foodstuff and consumer goods. It is active in more than 58 countries and has a total of 44,000 employees, 61 of whom are employed at the Dutch IT organisation. Total turnover in 2008 came to EUR 13 billion.