IT is a key enabler of any business and can help an organization go from good to great. However, many companies find difficulty in identifying the right IT investments and effectively delivering the full capabilities of the technology to the business community. This article is written to identify some of these common pitfalls and present strategies and tactics to mitigate.
- Issue: IT does not truly understand the business and critical business needs.
- To address this, ensure your hiring and placement strategy brings in the right individuals, with an internal customer focus, and an ability to speak to and understand the business. Having that business liaison can be that missing link in delivering tremendous value for your organization.
- Alignment of IT and corporate strategies need to occur, using something like Hoshin planning, to ensure these are fully integrated.
- Before an implementation, fully map out the impacted business processes end to end and identify inefficiencies and gaps. Ensure that the technology will actually quantitatively improve a business process.
- Remember, that process gaps and redundancies may have to be addressed before system deployment to ensure the proper benefit will be received.
- Issue: Under/overspending on IT investments.
- Focus on the business process that the system is intended to enhance. Select the best technology (not most expensive) to get the job done efficiently, and not the latest and greatest. Periodically improve the process and ensure the technology selected is scalable to match throughput/processing/performance levels well outside of today’s process capabilities.
- The management of technology initiatives needs to be monitored consistently for time and budgetary reasons. Focus on planning with the right, knowledgeable resources (which may have to be external) to garner realistic time and money estimates.
- Never implement a system or technology when you don’t have a strategy to get the right skills in house to manage the technology post go-live. Performing a gap analysis and implementing a resourcing strategy should be one of the first steps you do when choosing to implement a technology.
- IT should have a group that specializes in change management and process improvement, to effectively manage the project and technology changes appropriately. Also, this group needs to understand business processes and be able to assess any business process changes required along with having an ability to create an effective future state. This will help in getting your arms around the associated expenses.
- Issue: Projects aren’t prioritized properly.
- IT is an investment and should be treated as such. When doing investment into a portfolio, you don’t select just any fund, bond, or equity, do you? No, you select the appropriate investment vehicles to meet your individual goals. IT investment is no different.
- First, you need to understand the goals and objectives of the organization.
- Second, you need to understand the priorities of the organization. For example, is it more important to manage the bottom line or to strategically get a foothold in new markets? The answers to these questions will determine which IT projects are higher priority than others.
- Third, a mature resource management process needs to be implemented organizationally to monitor allocation of resources and effective deployment of certain skill sets. This is key to preventing the organization from taking on more than it can effectively deliver.
- Potential IT projects should be mapped to the goals and priorities of the organization and quantitatively scored. Then, this initial prioritized list should be reviewed by leadership and a qualitative factor should be applied.
- Project/program/portfolio continuous improvement and standardization has to be a key element of improving the effectiveness of any IT investments over the long term. The SDLC and project methodologies need to be reviewed and improved periodically, as a matter of procedure, based on lessons learned and best practices.
- Issue: IT productivity and effectiveness is not accurately and completely measured.
- An IT strategy will be incomplete unless there are key measures to track against. The measures should be in the areas of project delivery (against time and budget), productivity, service delivery, uptime, internal/external customer satisfaction, etc.
- Business relevant metrics should be agreed upon with the business and presented periodically (quarterly or monthly).
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