IT Moves In — With the Business

Computerworld -

Judith Spitz (left) and Mary Jane Johnston of Verizon Communications Inc. Image Credit: Giorgio Palmisano

Verizon wanted customers who called in orders or service requests to get great service quickly without talking to a rep, and IT had a major role in getting the job done. "Just delivering the system was not going to cross the finish line for us," Spitz says. "The way we operate had to be different."

So Spitz, senior vice president of network systems at the New York-based company, put her IT workers right in the call centers, engineering centers and dispatch centers. That way, they could see firsthand how to improve business processes.

"It probably saved our lives," says Mary Jane Johnston, who was then vice president for the fiber solutions center. "Their availability to us -- their willingness to understand our world -- was tremendously helpful." (Johnston has since been promoted to market area president for the Potomac region.)

While many companies are struggling to get IT and business on the same page, Spitz and other technology executives are finding success by putting them together. They have put IT staffers and their business partners side by side to develop a better understanding of one another's jobs so they can deliver better products.

In 2004, Debra Rice, IT applications director at WellPoint Inc., an Indianapolis-based health benefits company, was in charge of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project to rewrite the software that handles payments to health care providers. After watching the effort flounder for a year, Rice says, she moved her IT workers in with finance in April. "It was very important to make sure both sides understood what we were going for," Rice says. "There's a different sense of team because we're situated together."

Now, with IT on the scene rather than siloed 15 miles away, the two groups are talking more, reviewing plans and answering questions in real time. "You can't do that on the phone or in e-mail," she says. "That's probably our biggest gain -- that we don't have to repeat. We do it right together the first time."

Rice reports that the project is back on track, and three recent milestones were reached on time and within budget. "I don't think we would have achieved them if we were not collocating," she says.

Together All the Time

Such successes have pushed some companies to employee collocation all the time. Take the case of Pfizer Inc. The New York-based pharmaceutical company has had its operations-oriented IT workers embedded with business divisions for more than a decade. "Once technology started to be viewed as something that could give a competitive advantage, it had to be closer to the business units to understand priorities," says Fred Bennett, Pfizer's director of operations.