Leaping Onto The Change Bandwagon

In most organizations where I have recently consulted, business executives are dissatisfied with IT. This dissatisfaction is usually because IT isn’t delivering what the business wants or needs, or it is perceived that IT costs are not in line with the value being delivered.

Last year’s BES posts expressed high expectations by executive leadership for IT to deliver on both critical business imperatives and cost improvements. Sadly, it would appear that this has not happened.

Whether real or perceived, this is an important problem to address because IT is now seen as contributing to the failure of achieving important business objectives and wasting significant budget dollars on low-value activities.

The size of the problem varies, and therefore the executive leadership appetite to address it does as well. But if it is a big problem, with critical business objectives missed and/or IT costs way out of proportion to the services provided, then why isn’t the problem being fixed?

The answer almost always can be classified as one of these three statements:

•    We are planning to fix the problem.
•    We are in the process of fixing the problem.
•    We have tried to fix the problem and it hasn’t worked.

When pressed for more detail about how the fix will be approached, or what actions are being taken, the response is usually an IT-centric one that focuses on process and organizational change.

Frankly, and from experience, I believe that an IT-centric approach to solving the problem is fundamentally flawed and will invariably lead to the result in the third statement.

Which brings us to the point of today’s post – the introduction of a new series.

Entitled “Business-Centric Change” this series will describe an approach to solving the problem (captioned in the first paragraph) of “IT isn’t delivering what the business wants or needs, or it is perceived that IT costs are not in line with the value being delivered” that is business-centric and IT-led.

Like BES, the BCC posts will appear weekly (or so, depending on my schedule). The first – entitled “The Problem” will be on the site next week. I hope that you enjoy the series and remember that your feedback and comments are always appreciated.

(From FAQ) I’ve heard a lot of talk about the Value Proposition of IT. What is it?

Value, at least economically speaking, is simply what you receive for what you are spending. In determining the value of IT services, depending on the business and the particular service, that value may have other dimensions than cost. The value proposition of IT depends on the services offered by IT, the measures of value articulated for these services by the business, how well IT is delivering against those measures and the weighting of that performance across services.

For example, I would suggest that for commodity services, where industry standard measures of service quality exist and may be benchmarked against, that the main dimension of value is cost at the standard service level. For delivery of business solutions or capabilities, the main dimension of value may be speed to implement (versus the most economical method), thus enabling a business advantage in time to market. For other services, quality may be the most important dimension of value to the business.

The business plays a key role in ensuring that the appropriate value proposition is defined and realized. IT can help frame the discussion, but it is the business that has to articulate the appropriate weightings for the dimensions of value. From that information, and agreed-upon measures, an objective scorecard may be built and maintained to determine how well IT is delivering against that value proposition.