An increasingly common business strategy for driving shareholder value, is to ‘move up the value chain’. Commoditisation is viewed as a death sentence opening the business to global competition and continuous downward cost pressure.
In the value chain approach the basic product or commodity is surrounded with value add-ons that offer increased margin opportunities and better deliver the true needs of the customers.
One such business that is adopting this transformational strategy has also recognised that to climb this chain their IT must be better integrated with their business processes. To establish the current integration level between IT, the business and their future requirements, we are using our BizMaps® and AssessIT® products from our Enterprise RangeToolkit. These provide a clear, unbiased foundation on which to develop the necessary transformation programme of work.
The first stage of the engagement is to establish the set of services to be measured. Here, we found the business was keen to decompose IT into its commoditised elements – printers, disk storage, email servers etc. which is rather odd given the overall business objective driving this work is to move the company up the value chain.
After some discussion, the value chain mind set was applied to IT and yielded services such as document management, the company communication channel and remote working. These services were far more business relevant and will ultimately be easier to manage as part of the transformational strategy – in fact all the benefits a client would expect from services higher up the value chain.