Can I pick your brain? If you’ve ever had a peer (especially a well-respected one) ask you this question, you know how rewarding it can be to share your advice, knowledge and experience with those who can use it to better themselves and achieve their own goals. You may have also reached out to a peer yourself and gleaned some highly valuable information. You also likely realize that it takes time to get to know people, understand their goals, dreams and the engine that drives them. It takes more time to check in, give your attention and listen to the needs, problems and opportunities of other people. The bottom line is: It takes work to build meaningful peer relationships.
But, building relationships with respected peers, across industries and in different companies, is also arguably the most important thing you can do in business today.
There are countless reasons to invest your time and energy into networking and building trusting relationships with your peers, and even more ways to do it today. With local events, tradeshows, online social networking, community events, national industry events, national subject matter summits and symposia, online forums and live roundtables, there is no shortage of opportunities to connect with peers.
But are you getting the most out of every interaction? With the limited time you have to keep track of all of your responsibilities in your job and stay current on trends and current events that affect your job, you may be wondering how can you effectively leverage the expertise of your peers and get the most value from the limited time and effort you have to invest in building these crucial relationships.
At Wisegate, our business is connecting senior leaders in Information Security and IT to effectively solve problems, save time and avoid reinventing the wheel. Below are five ways Wisegate members leverage the expertise of their peers to the fullest degree, and the good news is, you can do it too.
- Quickly Build a Business Case: When you are faced with building a business case to support an investment that will drive business forward, save time or avoid risk, the best way to effectively do this is to look at peers who have successfully sold the same or similar investments in their own organizations. Look for those who have the solution in place and ask for samples of their business case, and be sure to understand what sold it internally for them.
Example: Scott won support from management to combine Risk and Security roles in his company, using data and input from Wisegate peers who had combined security and risk roles in their own organizations- and got himself a promotion.
- Save on Consulting Costs: When budgets are tight and consulting is not an option, use strategies and advice directly from experienced peer experts.
Example: Tom saved thousands of dollars using Wisegate peers and templates they provided instead of a consultant to help develop his IT roadmap and act as a sounding board for his ideas.
- Shorten Vendor Evaluations: Make a quick and confident decision while avoiding risk in your next vendor purchase, but don’t just take the Sales Guy’s (No offense to my sales peers here) word for or rely on the testimonials written on by their Marketing Department on the vendor’s website. Get multiple firsthand viewpoints on the products you’re evaluating (or considering evaluating) at once by setting up a roundtable of current users and those who evaluated the products you are looking at but chose to use a different vendors. Effectively get pros and cons from real experiences of those implementing the technology or service, rather than just the word from the vendor or consultants who implement and leave. By getting a discussion of several peers at once, you will find trends, understand where you can negotiate and potentially even skip a POC to save time if you have enough confidence from peers who have successfully implemented the technology or service in similar environments.
Example: Denny shaved off 7 months and saved thousands of dollars using input from peers on MDM solutions and by leveraging the BYOD policy of a peer from a fortune 1000 organization. Read more about Denny’s Story on the Wisegate Blog.
- Reduce Cost and Time in Creating IT policies, Templates & RFPs: Why reinvent the wheel on building policies, RFPs and vendor selection templates or board presentations when you have peers who have already invested the time to create these tools? Leverage their work, then make it your own. Be sure to reciprocate by sharing your own tools and templates you have created. Finally, to create new documents, try a crowdcreation approach by splitting up the work and sharing the workload across 10-15 peers that can all participate, add expertise and gain value from the creation of shared tools and templates.
Example: Nikk saved $50,000 creating his BYOD policy by leveraging an existing policy another member had shared, and was able to complete his own policy in a fraction of time it would have taken hiring a consultant or starting from scratch.
- Benchmark Your Maturity: No, I don’t mean your personal maturity- that’s for another discussion. It is hard to gauge where you and your organization stand from a benchmarking perspective. Sometimes you just need perspective on a certain issue or question, but don’t have funding for a full benchmarking consulting engagement that can run from $20,000 – $100,000 +. You can, however, formally or informally poll your peers to understand what they are doing, how much they are staffing, what they are spending, how much risk they tolerate and how mature their IT or Security programs are.
Example: Caedmon used Wisegate to benchmark his Identity Management Program and gain additional investment to stay ahead of the curve. (P.S.- If you are an Identity Management professional, you can take part in this year’s IAM survey here: https://qaz1.az1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_40BRvLO2YYZ6DTT )
If this all sounds good, but you are thinking to yourself “I don’t have time to organize round tables or search my network, LinkedIn or Google to find the right peer to talk to for every challenge or opportunity,” then Wisegate’s Knowledge System may be a great resource for you.
Don’t wait. Check out how it works today: http://www.wisegateit.com/features/
Know of other ways you can leverage the expertise of your peers? Please feel free to share with your comment below, or reach out to me to connect via LinkedIn.