investiledysfunction

I’d previously written a post about liking the actions of Kimberly Clark’s CIO Ramon Baez who was trying to take jargon out of the IT culture at the company.

Well, Mr. Baez continues to push things as detailed in a recent blurb in BusinessWeek entitled, Techie Charm School.  The brief article describes some of the actions he’s taking:

“The day of the nerdy tech guy may be past at Kimberly-Clark, which recently ran a finishing school of sorts to teach its IT team the finer points of corporate interaction. The two-day seminar was the culmination of an IT reshuffle that started about a year ago in which the company outsourced 80% of its tech needs. The 800 or so surviving code crunchers and software specialists were handed a new job description: Bring IT knowhow to business problems. There were pitfalls aplenty. The techies had to learn to think strategically and speak a foreign language: jargon-free English.

At first, “attrition was high,” says CIO Ramon Baez, but most made the transition. The July seminar, including tips on relationship building, topped off the training. Baez says his newly burnished tech team is solving shipping problems and forging ties with retailers. And dressing better. “Some days they even wear sport jackets,” he says.”

The attitude shift Mr. Baez is promoting is refreshing.  If the dress code changes signify that attitude shift is occurring, good for Kimberly Clark.

Today’s Wall Street Journal had a blurb from their Business Tech Blog about Ramon Baez who has started a campaign against jargon within the company.  Wow - this is a seemingly simple thing but something a lot of organizations with their own language, e.g., finance, IT, etc fail to do.

The blog posting which I’ve included below almost in its entirety is refreshing because of Baez’s outlook.

Baez has tried to eradicate tech speak and acronyms since joining the consumer-goods giant a little over a year ago. He’s starting with the emails that the information-technology department sends out whenever it has to make changes to a system. You probably know these messages: They’re the ones that make your eyes glaze over for the three seconds it takes to find the delete button.

Baez tells the Business Technology Blog that these emails used to say things like the TFPS server will be unavailable on Saturday. “Even I don’t know what that is,” Baez says, adding that the information is useless unless it’s clear to people what a system does. When Baez sought out the source of the email, he found it was sent by the team that manages that server in India.

In order to make sure that his staff is sending out messages with information people can use, he’s brought in communications staffers to vet each outbound email. And he insists that the emails make it clear who a message is intended for, with language like “if you use this system please read on.” That way, people who don’t use it can delete the message immediately.

Baez also made sure he solved one other consequence of the dreaded email from IT: Tech staffers must coordinate maintenance schedules with the rest of the business. That way, no one will time a network upgrade for the one weekend when everybody has to work.

This last point is so incredibly key.  How many times have I seen or experienced tech taking a system down because they had to with little no thought to the business needs for that system?  With all of the talk of governance and the business value of IT and other rambling nonsense, it’s nice to see a CIO who realizes that it can be simple things that can make a difference.  And doing these basic little things can build a great deal of credibility with the rest of the organization.