Amongst all of today’s credit crunch turmoil, it’s easy to miss the fact that there is a fundamental change going on in the way organisations think about their IT investment.
Gone are the days when an IT function could dictate to the business units what they could have. Today, control of IT investment is moving to the business functions. He who controls the budget is automatically able to define what he (or she) wants – and with today’s business pressures nobody is holding back on that one.
This poses a big challenge for IT leaders. How can they meet the needs of the business units? How will they ensure a consistent IS strategy when different business units want to go in different directions? How can they help the business units shape what they want in a way that’s deliverable?
The future, therefore, now has three dimensions that IT leaders will have to be able to demonstrate and deliver:
- How do they keep the overall IT infrastructure – that an organisation depends on - manageable, operational and appropriately charged back to the business units?
- How can they ensure the business units have the systems they need – when they need them.
- How will they know what value they’re creating for the business units in business terms? How are they impacting on each business unit’s key performance indicators?
So, what does all this actually mean? It means that there needs to be:
- A tighter coupling between business strategy, business processes and IT strategy.
- An agreement of the organisation-wide objectives, performance metrics and the related governance structures that make them work.
- A structured and replicable way that business units and IT can discuss effectively what’s required, which projects need to be prioritised and the value that change will create.
- A means to ensure that business value creation is the primary basis for making decisions about change.
The theory of achieving this is relatively straightforward. The practicality of achieving it however, is certainly more elusive. Ask yourself this; How good is my organisation in this respect?