Shaun Smith, Senior VP and CIO at Phillips Edison

Do you view business as a customer or a partner of IT?

“Our business units are a customer of IT, but we focus on building very close relationships with our customers. We’ve moved from monitoring the network and the server, to building out very specific features that our customers need and want in our applications. We’ve established regular networking meetings with our business teams, in which I myself, the CIO, the head of application development and the head of project management regularly meet with each business unit one-on-one to see what’s working and what’s not, and to learn how they feel about the different technologies we’re using and how we can improve them. It’s a social type of engagement, versus a client-partner relationship.”