There’s an old proverb that says: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
It’s not only good life advice, it’s an ethos organizations can live by.
With a growing number of sales channels, brands can no longer operate in their traditional silos. Commerce and IT teams, in particular, need to work more collaboratively.
To provide these teams with a roadmap for bridging their longstanding functional silos, the Digital Shelf Institute (DSI) and insights firm MikMak collaborated on a new report, “Bridging Gaps and Breaking Silos: The Building Blocks of Ecommerce to Win in Omnichannel.”
Experts from the DSI, MikMak, and Petmate shared insights from the report during a recent webinar, “From Conflict to Collaboration: Breaking Down IT and Business Silos,” detailing how internal teams can shift from conflict to collaboration. Here are their best practices for how IT and ecommerce teams can forge a more symbiotic relationship to achieve their organization’s larger strategic goals.
Why Cross-Functional Collaboration Is Now Critical in Commerce
Technology has become a big growth driver for brands.
“There are a lot of digital initiatives taking place that IT and the rest of the business really need to collaborate on,” Lauren Livak Gilbert, director of the Digital Shelf Institute (DSI), says.
Salsify and MikMak’s research found that IT often gets none of the credit if things go well and most of the blame if they don't. That has to change to foster real collaboration and eliminate the “us versus them” mentality that sometimes pervades organizations.
John Harding, Conair’s chief information officer (CIO) and one of the executives interviewed for the report, put it more simply: “The focus needs to be on IT and the rest of the business, not IT versus the business.”
Rethinking Enterprise Collaboration
Within brands, there are now more transparent conversations about what’s important, what technology teams need, and how to prioritize specific initiatives that impact the business. Many brands are also making a concerted effort to celebrate cross-functional wins, the report found. All of these things may help to shift perceptions of IT, but there’s even more that brands can do.
Collaboration doesn’t just require intention. It requires consistent action, starting with having a framework for collaborative planning.
Collaborative Planning
Most brands have an annual strategic plan, but there needs to be room to adapt their strategy based on the business’s evolving technology needs.
Rather than an annual plan, teams should have a more iterative planning process developed using cross-functional input. The report found that nearly every brand approaches this differently.
Some brands document business needs and then have a cross-functional committee review and prioritize them.
Others map renewal commitments and multi-year contracts to get a baseline budget. From there, department heads create a wishlist. Leaders schedule a prioritization meeting with these cross-functional partners and review their needs mid-year.
Some brands even have a ranking system where stakeholders propose projects. Leaders then review key performance indicators (KPIs) and subsequently rank what’s most important now, in the short term, and in the future.
Regardless of the approach, the report found that leading brands underwent collaborative planning at least quarterly, if not more, according to Livak Gilbert.
Setting Priorities
Developing a framework for project prioritization is also important. Marnina Edelhart, director of marketing events at MikMak, suggests a prioritization rubric that can help teams make better prioritization decisions based on both functional and technical fit.
“We've got to think about how we communicate effectively with IT about our priorities and make sure we're coming to them in a way that gets buy-in,” she says.
The prioritization rubric is designed to help ecommerce teams get this buy-in. For example, teams can tout the great technical fit of a solution, highlighting how it seamlessly integrates into their organization’s existing tech stack. Alternatively, they can focus on the functional fit and how the solution aligns with a particular strategic goal or has a broader impact across the enterprise.
“If you're coming from the IT team, you might be thinking a little bit more along with the CFO [chief financial officer] about the dollar signs, because often IT teams are owning more of the budget right now,” Edelhart says. “If you're coming from the marketing or commerce team, you've got to make the argument for why those extra dollar signs are worth it and how that's going to pay off in the end. And it often does, but you just have to be ready to align it with the KPIs.”
Darren Silverman, current senior vice president of marketing at Petmate and the company’s head of digital, commerce, and media, at the time of the webinar, adds that it’s critical for leaders to help their teams understand how the organization determines prioritization.
"That's really some of the effort — keeping them from being discouraged, understanding it doesn't mean what you want isn't important, it's just that there’s a list of priorities,” he says. “We're a manufacturer. We have massive distribution facilities. All those run on technology. So, it’s really about helping the team understand the bigger picture, and then challenging them to frame out the ‘why’ behind some of their asks."
How Petmate Forges Better Cross-Functional Collaboration
Petmate, a leading supplier of pet products, has a distinct approach to collaborative planning and project prioritization that blends many of the strategies reflected in the report.
Silverman says this process includes functional heads sharing their IT wishlist and problems they want to solve across the enterprise. Silverman gives the example of making a business case for a new review monitoring system. During the wishlist process, his team realized the tool had value across the business.
“[It’s about] trying to get different teams to collaborate together and say, ‘Hey, this is a business need across ecommerce, quality assurance, and product development,” he says.
Silverman says he’s also been successful by reframing how he approaches getting budget resources. Rather than going through the normal bureaucratic process to get finance and leadership on board, IT is now his first stop.
This allows everyone involved to better understand the potential technical roadblocks to implementation, properly scope the project, or even recommend alternative or complementary tools that enable Petmate to maximize strategic investments.
Key Tenets for Better Collaboration
Salsify and MikMak’s report features 12 key tenets of success for better collaboration. Think of these as core principles that can guide brands as they dismantle internal silos.
During the webinar, the experts covered a few of the tenets.
Market Your IT Successes
From an IT perspective, if nothing breaks, no one notices. That, in and of itself, is worthy of acknowledgment.
“As the non-IT team, [we need to] make sure we're recognizing those weeks without tickets, make sure we're recognizing when things move smoothly,” Edelhart says, adding that IT leaders also need to be more vocal about their team’s wins and contributions to the organization.
Create Shared Goals
This one is obvious, but if teams always have separate goals, they won’t ever be able to align effectively. Shared goals create shared accountability and shared outcomes. When all those things come together, organizations make significant progress.
Focus on Data Governance
Data is crucial to drive growth and profitability. The problem is that many brands have ongoing challenges with data quality and extracting meaningful insights from enterprise information. Good data governance must become an organizational priority, Edelhart says.
“If your sales team is entering data into Salesforce incorrectly, then you can't act on it well,” she says. “If you have technology that's pulling in data points that’s clogging up the works, nobody can work with that. So, we need a good data governance program that everyone has bought into. That will fuel all business priorities more effectively.”
Educate IT on Commerce
If you work in commerce, then you likely know all the acronyms. However, IT teams aren’t immersed in this world, so it’s crucial for their non-technical counterparts to educate them. It’s important to create a common language across the organization, according to Livak Gilbert.
“Continuous education here is just really, really important,” she says. “Finance and legal need the same education. So, I would just do a broader education program and include all of your cross-functional partners.”
Define Your ‘Why’
With so many competing priorities within organizations, teams need to make a solid business case for any technology investment.
Livak Gilbert says teams need to define the business value of a solution and the business goals it will support.
“You need to make sure that it's actually driving the business forward,” she says.
Some brands have built this into their prioritization framework by creating templates that ask stakeholders to answer a series of questions around the “why” for the project and the business value it drives. A similar approach may also be beneficial to other organizations.
Bringing IT and Business Together
Collaboration is essential to improve ecommerce operations, but so is empathy.
Organizational silos have made it difficult for teams to understand the full value their cross-functional partners bring to the organization or the day-to-day challenges they face. This has to change for brands to foster stronger strategic alignment and the type of collaboration that pushes their business to the next level.
It has to be a true partnership where the customer experience is the central focus. Once IT, digital, and business teams have that bigger picture, collaboration becomes less of an organizational mandate and more of a guiding principle.
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