“Can I have my Kip?”
TRANSCRIPT
Peter: Welcome to BRM cafe Episode 8. In this episode I talk to Kip Fanta about the challenge of building a BRM team, the importance of top down tone, difference between private and public companies and commodity outsourcing. Kip, welcome to the podcast. Let’s start with the introduction of who you are and what you have done in your career as a business relationship manager?
Kip: Well, Peter it’s great to be with you. Thanks for asking me to join you today. This is an exciting area I’ve been interested in for quite a while and it goes back to my career at Procter and Gamble so I had twenty five years working at Procter and Gamble within their I.T. shared services organization and around the year 2000, the CIO kind of created a new structure and began to manage shared services for Procter and Gamble as long as well as being the CIO and at that time he put in what he called client managers and he really had a good insight of as we start to manage this holistically and try to scale and be more strategic. I’m going to put these, you know, I.T. global business service leaders accountable for these relationships. So starting in 2000 I had the opportunity to be in multiple different BRM roles. So about half of my 25 years a career at Procter and Gamble I had the opportunity to do these roles and saw the difference that it made. Of course, it took some time but it got to a very mature model of the relationship managers and the capabilities that brings. So a lot of experiences, a lot of stories from that time and I decided, you know what, I’m going to go ahead and continue to do so my own stuff. I got a lot of passion, a lot of energy. So after 25 years took one of those early retirements and have been on my own journey since that time and I’ve had the opportunity to get connected into some of the work and the federal government where they are also needing business relationship management in a big way and there was a CIO that was put in place at the Veterans Affairs that had again a very strategic view of this, knew that she needed to do something different and I was brought in to help her start an account management office is how she coined that area but it was all about BRM. So for the last 15 months or so I have been working on that with Veterans Affairs as a part of an organization and Mieder actually works across all federal government and providing I.T. engineering service kind of consulting capabilities. So my work continues that the VA work continues with Mieder. It’s a wonderful opportunity to be doing BRM work in the government right now.
Peter: So you said a few things actually here. It took some time to build at Procter and Gamble. Can you talk a little bit about, what really was some of the challenges you encountered over the years?
Kip: Yes, and I think these are consistent to anyone that be listening to this, can relate, right? Fundamentally, if you’ve got some challenges in your core services and core infrastructure, core things that I.T. and service is doing, you’re going to right away be asked to tactically help with that, right? and get in there and I just need this to work, Kip. I’m not sure what your role is can you go fix that project or fix that particular service or operational area. So that’s been a very interesting place to be when you’re early in the BRM type of model. The business I think gets it and they like actually having a central point of contact that’s what they sometimes say even though we know it’s not just that but it just takes a while to kind of move up that ladder, move up the maturity model so where they see that you’re not just helping connect and orchestrate and do some of the things that we know BRM do but to get up to level four or five adviser partner. It just takes time and I think that’s one of the things that BRM’s have to recognize is you. This is a journey. So business partners I think took a while to understand and get a sense of the role responsibility but also inside of I.T. and service area as we all know it takes clarity of roles responsibilities and how do you partner internally. So I just love the role because you’ve got to be real strong partner inside and a real strong partner outside and that’s what makes these roles very challenging. So I think just time persistence was what the name of the game was early on.
Peter: The journey of becoming that strategic BRM and what do you feel that what needs to be in place to be able to get to that strategic partnership? What kind of environment needs to be in place?
Kip: I think one of the things that our CIO did was really top down setting the tone and the structure so it is very clear as he was meeting with the senior leaders of Procter and Gamble, that role definition of expectations was very clear with the business leaders. I didn’t have to be asked to meet with the senior business leaders. It was an expectation that I’d be showing up at their office. So the top-down tone and support, if that’s not there, then it’s a very big challenge I think and I know many BRM face that where someone in the middle level of the organization wants to bring in BRM but I can tell you we’ve got to try to really work that top down tone. If you’ve got the top down tone, it really enables it and makes it a lot easier. I think the other thing was I’m a big fan of proximity and relationship building, the R part of BRM I always emphasize. You cannot I believe do this and move as quickly as you want to strategic partner adviser without really getting to know and walk in the halls and be on the drive bys, the mount of drive bys “that I would have” with senior business partners who began to see me on the floor, “oh, hey, Kip, oh, good that you’re here. We just ran into something. Could you come in and talk to it?” That’s not a scheduled meeting. That’s not something that has to be worked two weeks ahead of time so I’m a big fan. If you want to become strategic, you’ve got to have relationships. You’ve got to begin to know these folks. They’ve got to begin to feel comfortable with you. That’s the way trust is built. You don’t walk in demanding trust and expecting that. They got to see results, they got to start to feel comfortable with you, and all of a sudden you’re being brought in in the middle of the day after lunch because, the CFO and you are brought in to talk something very strategic.That takes time but I believe one of the things is tone from the top and then being there, proximity, relationship building. That’s why I also recommend don’t stretch BRM’s across so many business units so now I’ve got 10% of my time. I think that’s very difficult to work passed level three or might just take longer. Those were some of the things that jumped out to me Peter to really drive a trusted adviser, strategic partner. They’ve really got to see you invested in with them, with their area.
Peter: But that means automatically spending a lot of time with them as you said, which again, you mentioned that you can’t spread them too thin basically over multiple business partners but I still see that especially in the tactical level, with tactical BRM basically that they have eight, ten, sometimes even more business units that they need to work with and they’re losing basically some of their business partners because they don’t spend enough time with them.
Kip: Yes and I think in the spirit of trying to do BRM and trying to do the best they can, people jump out there, right? And they want to cover everything. I think there’s a watch out there. I spent a lot of time now in my work helping people with some criteria on how do you apply– if you had ten, let’s say we just have ten, BRM’s just starting with. What are we using to place them? Because I coach a lot that don’t take that ten and try to cover the company. Let’s be smart about the value, the influence and based upon geography, based upon complexity, based upon again the value and the influence, all right, we’re actually not going to put anyone over there right now and then I will manage when they come to say, “Hey, can I have one?” Oh, you bet you can but not yet. We’re getting money. So I think it’s very important just to develop some of criteria and how do you place and how do you enable because the first moment of truth, which is a term that Procter and Gamble used all the time in their marketing area but their first moment of truth with your BRM implementation can make a break. You do not want to have the wrong person being spread so thin, you can crash and burn and now you’re taking a couple more years to start again because you didn’t come out effectively to begin with. So it’s a very important discussion period that you are bringing here that I think in the energy and excitement of doing BRM you’ve got to be smart about how you do it and I think the’re several things that come into play.
Peter: And the question then is, okay, what do you do with the business partners basically that you don’t spend intentional because the challenges and this is how I think what a lot of BRM actually experience is that if I don’t spend time with them they might actually start doing things on their own and that might not be good as well. So the question is, okay, how do you handle them, how do you handle the departments you don’t work with and lose track of that?
Kip: I think I actually love when that happens so example might be, I own a global business unit and maybe in each region there’s a general manager, right? And we’re going to start with the signing of BRM to the global president, at headquarters but we don’t have the ability to sign BRMs in each region yet. Okay, so let’s say that’s how we start out. Well, all of a sudden, in Europe they go, “Hey, Kip, when can I have my Kip? I love what you’re trying to do and it makes sense. You’re making it clear on how to work with I.T. and services.” Then, I would go something like this, “Man, I’m glad that you’re excited. It’s good that you’re seeing the value of what we’re trying to do. We do want to bring stronger I.T. and services and this role I think helps.” What you can do is make sure you’re sharing that with the president back at headquarters who I work with because as you know funding and resourcing, of course, is just out there hanging around. There are choices to be made all the time on how we fund roles and how we do FTE’s in career. So the more that you’re talking to your direct manager, the more I’m going to hear that from him when I’m meeting and then ultimately my CIO is going to go, oh my, Kip’s organization is screaming, for more of these and they got money to spend because we’re going to have to get their dollars to put someone in Europe. So that’s one of the things I spend a lot of time on is get the business to be your cheerleader because as you said, it takes time, it takes investment and have them help you with that.
Peter: Little bit of a different question but you worked, I mean, 25 years for Procter and Gamble and likely you’ve been working for government. That always begs as question, how different are they?
Kip: I think as many people could maybe assume or expect and before going to government I might have known this too. I think government is behind in many areas. Right? And I don’t think what they have done is reached out as to external and partnering as much as they can for reasons that they have a lot of resources and money and they kind of I think entrench themselves but they probably have not kept up with the times on frameworks or approaches and technologies and such, so I think they’re realizing that right now in the last several years and I think they’re catching up. So I think that’s one big thing that they’re behind in terms of capabilities and such and then I don’t think they have done perhaps as good a job developing also the roles and the skills and the people side and so I think they’re also realizing we’ve got to do a better job there. Many people are maybe start their career in government and don’t come from the outside. They don’t have other experiences and they just maybe haven’t had some of the skill and the training development per se that would make them who they need to be added to more senior level. So those are two broader strokes that I see from a government versus the Corporate Procter and Gamble side of things but I think there’s a willingness to learn and be energized and to jump right in and with talking, on the whole politics of things. There’s just a lot of stuff going on there that particularly in the U.S. this is the talk the U.S. this is where I can focus in that just has to kind of be looked at carefully and adjusted. A lot of good things were put in place probably decades ago that need to maybe swing back a little bit on that little pendulum and find the right place in the middle, procurement and acquisition and just so many topics just need to be re-looked at, which will help but I think smart leaders in government now are starting to recognize that and start to partner with some others and to leverage, folks that have been doing this work before. So I’m expecting good things, there are plenty of work to be done.
Peter: Do you feel that the BRM role is different in government?
Kip: Well, I would say that what’s exciting about BRM in the government is I’m not sure they really have or understand that. There’s a lot of silo work. The siloing is significant in government, in an organization. The functions don’t talk to each other, business units don’t talk to each other. There’s no one sometimes trying to bridge that, which of course BRM just goes hello. Let me help bring all this together, let’s work more strategically within the organization the enterprise to the service and such. So it’s a huge opportunity I think in government to have individuals and capabilities that kind of help converge, help look broader than just finance and H.R. and I.T. and the business unit over here and such huge value. I think it’s that’s why the CIO of Veterans Affairs she saw that. By the way, she had come from the outside as well and so she recognized this opportunity to be more strategic, start to work more holistically within an enterprise and that’s why I’m excited about this current place that I’m at because it’s a huge opportunity to do relationship management and again the R part probably not as recognized in government, the importance of it. Maybe, I’m going to tell you to do that, we’re going to do it now, you’ve got to collaborate. You’ve got to build relationships here, those kind of things.
Peter: Do you feel I.T. organizations are at risk in that case?
Kip: Yes.
Peter: If they don’t do BRM?
Kip: Yes. I think in general, not just government but I think as I was thinking about this in my Procter and Gamble days and working with suppliers and partners, I think many people perhaps are at risk to be completely commodities. I remember my president who after years, I had a continuity with one of my presidents for four years as his senior BRM. So by the end of that assignment you can expect a very strategic trusted relationship and he would sit with me and goes, “Hey, Kip you know what. This has been good. Things are moving in the right direction. However, as you know your organization continues to have opportunities” And as you would expect with the cloud, I got vendors coming right to me. They’re bypassing your organization, because they’re recognizing, “Hey, we don’t even need their data centers. We can just work with the business president.” So I think in the days that we live right now with I.T. and service, everything is a service, right? Unless organizations move up the strategic ladder, I think business partners are going to continue to more more question, why do we have so many middle people, why do I have this entire enterprise group when, boy, the outside is coming strong and they seem like they have everything that the inside groups providing and they’re very strategic nowadays. So unless the enterprise.. unless the inside of the organization, the CIOs and the service folks begin to demonstrate one more value, I think they are at risk that they will continue to be looked at as more commodity, which we can outsource the entire thing and I think they’re smart sourcing everywhere to be done, strategic sourcing needs to be done but I’m a huge fan of keeping that strategic I.T. service enterprise organization to whatever amount you need. That is just really rocking it across the enterprise, no partner, no third party can do but it’s very important. You start to show up differently moving forward because of so many things as a service because of cloud and everything else.
Peter: It’s interesting because I actually see a lot of organizations do the opposite. They outsourced the new innovation part to strategy part to vendors because they don’t have the skill set and they keep the commoditize stuff internally, which always baffles me that because I would indeed like to reverse that and then say outsourced the commodity site and work on the new strategy, the new strategic innovations, etcetera but I see so many organizations doing the exact opposite.
Kip: Yes, and again, our CIO at Procter and Gamble saw that.They saw that coming and as a part of the organizational work he did when he brought in my roles and many others that started to have these roles with the business, he then began to do more strategic sourcing, what he said at that point, “You know what? We are not the best printer fixer people. We are not the best network. There’s a lot of companies out there that are really good at fixing computers” and so he very consciously, not easily. Right? This is hard decisions to be CIO and shares began to establish strong partnerships, strong partners not even just supplier, I want to say partner to manage some of that work and I.T. and service completely changed but he saw to your point Peter, wait, Kip actually knows the business. Kip knows I.T. You can’t buy that off the street. These folks have grown up inside of Procter and Gamble. They’re going to be able to bridge I.T. with the business like no one else can and so I do believe the way to go is as you are trying to coach as well, which is keep that strategic work. You can grow up as a developer, you can grow open operations and that makes you very well respected even coming into the meetings but as you now develop the BRM skills and you begin to become more strategic, it’s priceless.
Peter: Yes, absolutely. That’s the fun part I find from the whole BRM side is that being that strategic, that building up that business and understanding and yes, indeed, care less about I.T. in the basement and I.T. in the cloud side. I care about the business side and that’s I think what we need to cultivate, etcetera. Career planning for BRM. I mean, you’ve been in BRM for a long time and worked in different organizations. How do you see your seeing your BRM basically move forward? How do you see some of the career planning for them?
Kip: Well, I start to think at the top. So I think of a CIO who ultimately is the most senior BRM in my opinion, right? You can’t be a strong influential CIO unless you’ve actually been developing BRM skills along the way. We know perhaps CIOs that are the strongest project managers, strongest developers, great architects, infrastructure. All of a sudden, they’re put in a CIO role. They don’t know how to work with the business. They don’t know how to sit up in the boardroom, work with their peers in finance and marketing and whatever it is, in sales. They’ve never worked with people that don’t like them. So I start with the top and I have said to many people if you want to become a CIO or a president of shared services, you need to along your career have proactively put in several BRM roles. You need to work down in infrastructure operations, architecture or service, take a junior BRM role. I say junior BRM role because maybe you take supply, you take a function or a small business unit and you report to a more senior BRM role. So right away I think leveling and having this kind of structure within BRM support because you’ve got to start with the business unit that might be easier. They’re not too mean, they’re not too aggressive but you begin to develop skills and then maybe you go back to a service provider role or an operation. Then, you take a senior BRM role and you manage several BRM’s like, when I was the global BRM for a business unit, I had the regional BRM’s report to me because then I started to have a BRM in Asia. So I’m able to coach and work together. That takes proactiveness, that takes new competencies in the I.T. area. So even as I.T. is doing professional development or service development, you’ve got to start building an BRM competencies inside of that model and that’s what companies are beginning to realize is, these are new skills that I have to develop to me or my senior I.T. service providers, and so that’s not going to happen unless people are proactively thinking about this developing a career path and I still to this day say, you know, you want to be a senior, you want to be a CIO or C something, you better had a few BRM roles along the way.
Peter: Yes. So I agree with that. I love basically when I see senior managers basically even when they’re still managing shared services organizations that they actually know basically the business that they’ve actually been going to. I mean, I come from a background of starting at a service desk, which and then became usual, what we called [inaudible] liaison etcetera function and again the same thing I did some BRM work that I now know that’s BRM. I didn’t realize at that moment but that was a BRM role and that was may be very operational but understanding basically how you talk to the business but I think a lot of I.T. people actually have been pushed in BRM roles, as well, like, okay, you know how to talk to the business, so just go.
Kip: Yes, and I think it’s a very important point. There are a lot of people that get excited about BRM and then all of a sudden it’s the PMP flavor of the month and everyone wants to go do it and such. Well, I think we know Peter too that this is not for everybody. Many people would start to come and say, “Hey, Kip, can I meet with you over lunch. I’m interested in some of your kind of role and such” and what I would do is just over the conversation, over lunch they actually would self select them out because what they realized is, “Oh, I don’t like confrontation. Oh, oh, that’s, oh, well, maybe that’s not for me” and it’s not like I would be forcing people out of a BRM role but it’s so important for people to realize what they enjoy doing, what they actually have some of that normal skills that they bring, this is not just pure I.T. stuff as we know it some of these other skills of communication and leadership. So that’s a very important point that you don’t just throw people in here because they actually, you know, can talk. A lot of people can talk but when this push and pushes on you and is mean to you, can you stand up for yourself but also be humble at the same time. I always say humble confidence. I love those two words together and I think, you folks have talked that as well that you’ve got to have all these things mixed as a BRM.
Peter: I see that so often, I mean, I teach a lot of different BRM groups, etcetera on BRM professional courses, etcetera but I see some of them that actually are sitting in there and so I’m like, okay, you wanted a job but I don’t think you really understand what you actually want to do and I’m not sure you’re the right person actually to do this but, hey, I’ve also seen actually very introvert people that were actually in BRMs because they know they’re not that outgoing etcetera but they can build relationships, they’ve built up in a different way. So it’s interesting to see how many different personalities we have within the BRM space but, yes, it’s not for everyone. Absolutely.
Kip: No, and that’s why I may play someone, in more junior BRM role, maybe they’re a director, maybe they’re pretty high up in the organization but that doesn’t mean that they don’t take a more junior BRM role to get some kind of other skills, right? To test it out but the watch out is that you just assume this person can take on a senior executive business partner, that you want to be very smart how you develop this and make sure that you do have the right people there.
Peter: Let me just ask, do you have any specific questions for me or do you have other topics that you want to discuss?
Kip: Yes, one of the things that we talked this about, this a little bit already Peter that I spent a lot of time and I’d be curious in your work with BRM as well is, how do you turn this around and how do you have BRM really begin to actually enable and build the business up without them even knowing. What I mean by that is, so many times I.T and service folks are the bad people, the bad messengers, the evil side of the world and I spent a lot of my time helping the BRMs turn that discussion around and what do I mean by that? Yes, you may not be able to do everything that they want the business to do. So the business partners come with all this demand and the BRMs of course hate to say no. I can’t do that. I can’t do that. You’re no fun. You’re not a good partner to work with. I spent a lot of my time with the BRMs helping the business recognize what the BRM are trying to do. So a lot of my coaching is helping them have this kind of a conversation. Well, as you can expect you and all your peers have all of these great ideas and I love all this great ideas that you have.It’s excellent because I see a lot of good innovation but as you know my job is a BRM is to make sure that we’re being strategic with our spend and our investments and our choices. So, again, please make sure you’re working this with your peers and up your management because when I meet with your management and we’re making choices on where to spend I.T. and service money, this will be so helpful and because what they want to do is they want to beat up the BRM all the time and so I think what BRM need to realize is you actually have more control than you think. Don’t be the tail of the dog. Be very confident in how you help them understand what you’re trying to do and again help the business prioritize, help the business show up more strategic because sometimes the business partners are not strategic at all either. They’re all over the place and as BRM try to be strategic, sometimes it creates the need to help the business to be more strategic and I’ve had presidents say, you know what, thank you. They actually got together. They decided that among the four of them that what they wanted to do was already being done and the whole thing want to awake you because you had them actually go back and think about it and I don’t know if you see that too Peter but I think we have an opportunity to help the businesses BRM more than we think.
Peter: Yes, I think so. I think that we still see the BRM role quite often just as an I.T. role that does present I.T. and I think we all quite often see a lot of the BRM actually saying I need to educate the I.T. organization what they can and cannot do and they need to be more what we call more aligned to the business, etcetera and I have some like, that’s one part of your role but your role is also to educate business groups around what you’re going to do. I mean, that convergence of business I.T. when it becomes one team, that means both teams or both parties basically need to work as a team and need to understand that there is a different mindset. So I see a mindset different in the I.T. organization but I see definitely a mindset difference in business as well and I think this is one of the things. I mean, I’m doing some presentations in the fall around digital transformation and the need for BRM. Everyone is talking about, yes we need to change the way business works. We’re going to use that through all different kinds of technology, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, etcetera but to have someone like someone needs to get these two groups together on the same page and start moving forward and if we’re losing the business, if the businesses is groups basically are just ignoring technology or just saying I’ve found a new solution and I’m just going to implement this because this is the best thing but next month I might have a different solution that I want to have, it’s not going to work. It’s absolutely not going to work and the whole digital transformation I think is that’s why you see, for instance, BRM is key in that because I.T. is at risk. I mean, you said that before commoditizing stuff, artificial intelligence, I mean, etcetera but the vendors will actually bring that in. Business people that are managing or business leaders will have to start thinking about how can I use my internal I.T. groups to the best extent for the best way possible to be able to actually accomplish that digital transformation order, a new innovation etcetera and I think this is where I’d be ready to work on.
Kip: Yes, I agree. I think BRM is why I love it. It’s right in the middle and they are working both sides as you said Peter and that’s what makes these roles so fun, so challenging and again not for everybody, but they’re awesome roles and the business really values this and the more senior partner that you’re working with, business partner you work with, they get this. So what you have to do, wherever you are at that BRM level, I used to say this all the time, “Hey, put yourself business director in the shoes of your president.” Okay. Do you understand where that head for a second? Do you understand that he or she just can’t do everything. So put your shoes, you know, put that CIO head on, the CEO head on. Wear that for a second to think about it that way. It’s going to change how you approach this and my job here is to work that with you and, it’s really important BRM role. Though other part about this that I like is, my president is managing one business unit. What he was so impressed with was when I was able to come in and bring other things happening in other business units because again he or she has plenty to do managing this huge part of the company. It was always so impressive when I would say and by the way this is going on over there, might be something that we could– he would go, “Wow, how’d you hear that?” Now, he knows who’s over there in that business unit. He has all of the other functions in those business but no one actually reaches out as well as I.T. and service and BRM do and that BRM roles, my community of BRM, I always was in touch with them. We were always sharing and reapplying the value add that you bring just by sharing and reapplying what’s happening in other parts of the company. Again, no one’s able to do that like a BRM. That’s another huge value add that I found as a BRM I was able to do. I was connecting even business people together. Why am I connecting business people? You’re in the business, you’re in business. Well, I actually know them because my BRM’s over that business. It’s amazing the influence that we can have with the business.
Peter: You know what? In my years of I started in the mid 80’s in I.T. and in all my years of I.T. I have never been so excited about I.T. as in the last couple of years when I started working with BRM’s. It’s absolutely, it’s the excitement that you finally see things happening, etcetera and how things are moving forward and I love that. It’s so interesting. The part of networking you said, yeah, I mean, in my work as more a coach and facilitator for workshops, etcetera, I bring BRMs in contact with each other in different organizations and I find that it gives me great pleasure to see them meeting and I don’t even have to be involved in it but to hear them, yes, I talked to this person and this is what I learned from that and this is what I learned from this organization, etcetera and I think we quite often have a tendency to say, yes, I can’t, I mean it needs to be the same industry but I’ve seen so many BRMs learn from other industries and that’s why you like what you’ve done. I mean, you’ve worked with manufacturing and well, it is manufacturing really Procter and Gamble, of course, but in government. I mean, two totally different industries but you can learn so much from it by seeing the different groups and how you can actually move forward with that and that’s for me the exciting part of this.
Kip: I can’t be more excited. I mean, and it builds every day actually the more I see. So, a couple other thoughts Peter maybe that came to my mind about this area that I also share and talk about as, when do I see the BRM roles struggle and fail. Two things that I think make up a bad BRM if I could say it that way, but if you’re a power hungry, BRM not good. Okay? Because many times as we talk about BRMP and BRM, you’re influencing without direct reports some time. You are in front of your business unit representing whatever is behind you, a function, the entire I.T. service organization, whatever is, the best BRM’s are the ones that give credit where credit is due. They connect others to your business partner. I mean, my favorite story was my president would just kind of be walking down the hall. I thought he was coming to see me. Excuse me, kept going my way and he would go right over to a service manager that I had introduced him to the week before. Love it. I mean, he or she begins to establish that we are not the single point of contact, we’re single point of accountability. If you’re power hungry and everything has to go through you and, oh, my gosh, give praise to everyone behind you and then, all of a sudden, everyone in your entire organization can’t wait to work with you. Indirectly, who cares. I can’t wait to be in Kip’s team with that business unit even though my boss is over here. I can’t wait to work under Kip’s business area and the other thing I think that happens is the BRM goes native. They either, they basically can’t play in the middle. They sway way too over to the business side and they forget that they’re getting paid by their I.T. CIO or service or they go way too much inside of I.T. and they show up like an I.T. robot. You’ve got to be really smart. Some days I always say to the BRM, you’re not making either side happy. Welcome to BRM. I mean, you are right there in the middle but you cannot be so far on the business side. You forget that you’re actually there to provide great I.T. service work. So those that get swayed one way or the other and some days you might be swayed but you’ve got to come back and play that middle role. I would talk with my CIO all the time that the business loves BRM and the CIO and I would look at each other and we knew that BRM was not going to last long because they had gone so far that the business loved them and I love that. That’s great, but guess what. I.T. did not love them because they were not showing up at all anymore for the I.T. service side. A very important couple of things that I spent a lot of time with the BRM zone.
Peter: That’s awesome. Yeah. I love that because I have seen that indeed and quite often I encountered this through the question, what is better that the BRM reports to the business or to I.T? And I was like I don’t really care. It’s the work you do that is important. It is not who you report to and who you feel more accountable to or something like that. No, you built that shared ownership between business I.T. and you. You are that storyteller of that with lot of informal social networks that influences people, etcetera and that’s I think a very important part, so this is great. Kip, thank you so much for coming to the BRM cafe podcast. I really appreciate our conversation. So thank you and for your time. I’m looking forward to continuing some of our discussions and maybe coming back to some of this. So thank you very much for today.
Kip: Thank you Peter for having me and we’ll be in touch.
Peter: Great. Thank you very much.