There has been much talk lately of transparency in business. Transparency is the conducting of business in an open atmoshphere where customers, employees, vendors can all see your processes, results and status. It's been a hot buzzword due to the accounting scandals of the early 2000s. 

At the end of 2007 I spent time thinking about transparency. My mind tossed around the following questions:

Does transparency bring value?

Can transparency happen without effort?

What does transparency mean in an IT support organization?

I came to the conclusion that there is value in transparency, it requires effort and it means an increase of trust and business commitment to an IT support organization.

The value in transparency is the building of trust with customers. It's the option for the customers to become participants in the service business you offer and to allow their feedback based on priorities. In the loop of support there are always conflicting priorities, and you do seek out the customer's thoughts on which direction to choose, but there are times where customer feedback and advice isn't solicited. This leaves a gaping hole in your commitment to meet the customer's needs, which leads to a loss of trust.

Every IT organization isn't in the computer or technical support business. They are in the customer service business and they just happen to do computer and technical support. This is a massive misunderstanding most support organizations have. Instead of being focused on customer satisfaction they are focused on technical metrics. While there is no arguing that technical metrics have a place and may display customer satisfaction, nothing replaces discussions and feedback with the customer.

Transparency adds to this process and is critical in our information age. With everything moving online it's a simple step to make it available to everyone. There is no reason status reports, testing results, goal setting and accomplishments aren't opened to the customer to review. You are in the business of helping them meet their business goals.

Our group has made great strides in becoming transparent. The movement of documentation, status reports and more to the wiki is a good first step, but it misses the passive acquisition of information. For instance, for someone to really see what we're doing requires them to go to our wiki. While it's a simple procedure for us to dig into the taxonomy and search for what we need, it might be a more time consuming process for our customers. You cannot rely on your customers actively participating in a transparent process. You must make the transparent process a passive exercise.

We're taking several different steps to make passive transparency more available for our customers:

Simplified single wiki page: This page will be the main portal for our customers with simple terms and the information that is critical to them. The determination of what information is critical will be determined by customer interviews and feedback.

In out board: It's important that our customers know where we are when they need us. We do have processes in place for ensuring everyone can be contacted at any time, but a simple in out board allows our customers to quickly scan our roster and see where folks our deployed.

Complete status: Our status process at this time is filtered from the manager up. Every team member gives verbal or email status to the manager, but they don't document it in a centralized location. It's important to involve everyone in the process, as it allows our customers to understand the nature of the positions.

Ticket feedback: The majority of our work is related to trouble tickets. Someone has an issue, call us or enter a ticket and we fix the problem. Right now the only metric we have that the job is being done properly is the fact people don't call us back. You can't manage that way. At the same time it's a time sink if you ask every person who enters a ticket to rate service provided.  We can manually select an assortment of tickets, toss in a random selection and get a good overview.

Customer advice: The climate of suggesting improvements in a corporate environment is sometimes perilous. The problem is you need that feedback to improve, but most corporations undertake a very formal, rigid and time consuming process to get it. Most times it ends up being an exercise pushed from the top down. We need to cultivate an air where the customer can tell us how to do our jobs to help them meet their business goals.

Moving to a more transparent environment is going to increase trust, increase productivity and better focus our efforts on business goals.  

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