How can the Business Relationship Manager (BRM) role help facilitate innovation within Business Operations and Business Functions (IT, HR, Finance, etc.)?

The BRM is fundamental to business convergence, helping to bring together business operations and business functions at a strategic level. Leading organizations are now eliminating the service silos of yesterday, empowering business functions such as IT, HR, finance and the other departments to share accountability for strategy and business value through a teamed approach to value realization.

We know that the business innovates by changing business processes, expanding into new markets, creating new products, and exploiting changes to the macro-environment. On other hand, we are also aware that the business functions drive innovation as well, particularly through the expansion of capabilities and potential offerings. This is especially true of the IT sector, where the recent explosion of cloud-based IT services makes innovative capabilities newly available every day.

So how exactly does the BRM help facilitate the convergence of the business operation and function to produce innovative value creation?

For one thing, the BRM must keep up-to-date with the industry’s latest capabilities, as well as those within the business operational and functional capabilities. This way, the BRM will be aware of all the possibilities available to support the business’ ever-evolving needs. Ideally, this responsibility should be formalized in the BRM job description, as well as in other key roles.

Google used to encourage employees to spend 20% of their time on their own innovative ideas to add value to the company, which resulted in some fantastic services—and many failed ideas. Now, the company focuses on taking a more measured approach, encouraging innovation through a more top-down system in which specific areas or problems must be solved in innovative ways. In your organization, you may have some dedicated groups working in a similar model to Google, or you may even have innovative internal roles like that of the  Cloud Services Manager, whose responsibility it is to look at emerging cloud offerings and how they could be integrated within existing systems to bring added capabilities and value to the organization. If you’re really lucky, you may even have a Futurologist (coolest job title ever!) who is dedicated to looking beyond the current internal and external capabilities and instead foreseeing what is likely to be available in the future. With this role in your organization, you could plan to innovate and get even further ahead of the innovation curve.

However it works within your organization—and whatever functional area the BRM is in—the role of the BRM is key to merging not only the business operations and functions, but also their respective innovations, in order to ensure that they move together as a strategic partnership. Your BRM may not have a crystal ball, but you can certainly try and glimpse into a future of realized value—and then try and steer the convergence towards it.