Measure the success of your IT-business partnerships

CIO - Scenario: Measuring the success of IT-business relationships

Dwayne Warner, CIO, Carnival Cruise Lines

When I took over the role of CIO at Carnival at the end of last year, I knew the IT organization had to change. Our platform-centric approach, while efficient, couldn't provide the same value to the company and our customers that we could offer with a portfolio-centric approach. After speaking with my executive peers about where there was the greatest need for increased partnership with business functions, I shifted some of our application managers to portfolio managers and re-aligned the IT staff accordingly. These portfolio managers work closely with business teams to develop three-year road maps that facilitate the enterprise strategic plan.

This is the first time we've had a formal governance process that maps technology to business initiatives to help achieve business goals, and that spans departments within a function, such as finance or marketing. So now that we've set up the structure, we need to encourage people to embrace the change. The internal survey I conducted to gauge how the rest of Carnival now views IT shows an improvement compared to how they viewed the department in the past, but I am still trying to identify indicators of long-term success and methods that encourage acceptance.