In business and IT, you have to know your customer and understand how your company interacts with him or her. The current term for this is Business Relationship Management (BRM), and The BRM Handbook is the best textbook for managers on the mechanics of BRM. It's a standout in a field that's filled with squishy books that go on at length about how important BRM is, but which lack details. Ivanka Menken provides lots of factual information, real case studies, carefully considered commentary, and reasoned criteria with which to evaluate BRM best practices and strategies. You'll get a lot from her carefully researched book.

Menken devotes some of her volume to BRM background information but quickly gets to the issues that managers confronted with BRM decisions need to consider. She makes great use of bulleted lists, scorable quizzes, and checklists and templates(sections about what questions to ask relations, and why, are particularly good) that you can use right now to gauge any organization's suitability to BRM and determine how they need to change in order to get the most out of their systems.

Many CIOs today are using relationship management techniques to better integrate IT into the core business units. These skills are essential, as IT is expected to play a more prominent role in the direction of the business.

When a company matures and scales, it takes a different IT view, moving from reactive to predictive. The way to be successful is using relationship management techniques to further integrate IT into the business model.

Integrating IT into the core business unit does not occur overnight. Instead, that trust builds through a series of successful projects that shows IT can deliver value to the business. IT is rocket science, but, at the end of the day, it's also customer service, and Customer service is listening to the business and reacting accordingly.

The Business Relationship Management Handbook helps you to establish a framework for IT projects across the company and within individual business units, using relationship management practices and an investment and change management committee composed of top leaders to prioritize projects.

Menken's Comprehensive Business Relationship Management Handbook is thoroughly researched and written by experienced Service Managers, then reviewed by experts in the field. You can save hundreds of hours of research and writing by starting with prewritten documents. Covering for example BRM job description s, BRM Responsibilities and Skills, Service Requirements, Use of the Service Portfolio, Example Service Catalogues, 8 Steps to Developing a Service Catalogue, BRM Metrics and Reports, Service Options, Mapping Responsibilities & Requirements and much more.