Three Aspects of Digital IT Assessment

Assessing organizational personality, evaluating IT strength and weakness, managing company performance and maximizing business potential are all important digital management scenarios.

As businesses embark on the “Digital Era” of computing and managing, IT assessment is a great way to help identify what is right and wrong in your environment and how you can keep optimizing processes, improving management discipline, and leveraging limited resource and time to “Do more with innovation.” IT assessment should cover people, processes, products, and partners and should be performed objectively to remove any bias or tunnel vision from internal staff members, with the goal to accelerate IT performance and lift organizational maturity.

Make an objective assessment of IT effectiveness and efficiency: IT assessment needs to include the techniques such as pure health check techniques, customers feedback, business partner relationship analysis, etc, and those can be applied to give a holistic picture of what is working or not. A CIO must be able to develop and optimize IT operational function within itself. Think of it as an IT checkup. Not everyone will be happy about it, but hopefully, you can detect issues before they start to cause major problems. It is important to have IT resources, assets, and talent aligned with business strategies and objectives to improve IT effectiveness. It is also critical to have IT resources refined to the point that they are nimble, they can adapt to changing business demands in a timely fashion and it can be reapplied to altering business priorities and be effective (doing the right things) and doing more with less (IT efficiency). Thus, IT assessment also includes cost estimation which includes operational cost, financials, or calculation of the cost to fix varying problems such as structural quality, redundant processes or technology update. It also includes IT vendor cost such as monthly service expense, license cost, purchasing cost,e etc, as well as people cost such as salary, training investment, or other incentives., etc., making an objective IT assessment helps IT management to diagnose the early signal for dysfunctional operation, take a critical look at IT strength and weakness, with the goal to improve overall IT performance.

Make an objective assessment of IT management approach and speed: With digital paradigm shift, command & control style business management style is out of date, because it can only manipulate the short term people’s behavior or business result, it cannot truly influence the collective mindset and attitude which is one of the most critical soft business factors for accelerating digital transformation. Thus, it is important to make an objective assessment of the IT management approach. What is required for IT management quality check is clarifying the purpose and engaging all the people involved working together as a team to excel in the delivery of product/service with accelerated speed. The goal of IT management assessment is to drive a smooth shift from being a “controller” to “enabler,” from “T” technology oriented to “I” information driven, and leading through “pulling,” rather than “pushing only.” To put simply, IT can no longer wait for the business’s request, they must be engaged enough in the business to proactively participate in multidimensional value realization. The process of running a high-performance IT is adaptively rational, it has to strike the balance of ‘pushing forward,’ and pulling all resource for orchestrating a seamless digital transformation. It is also important to make an objective assessment of IT speed. Is IT perceived as the change laggard or IT is, in fact, a change agent? More and more businesses expect the consumerization style responsiveness from IT, IT management assessment includes assessing IT responsiveness - how IT meets the needs of the business and doesn’t waste time doing the thing that doesn’t matter. How IT is doing for delivering quality business solutions timely. Continually accelerating changes in IT consumption and production require faster responses and better performance metrics.

Make an objective assessment of IT performance and potential: Not only should IT be managed well, but also it has to be measured right. Selecting the right KPIs is one of the most important steps in IT measurement and performance management because the processes include answering why you are choosing that, how you will use them and whether you have enough resources to manage information as well as present them persuasively. To reinvent IT reputation, IT metrics have to evolve from being a cost center to becoming a revenue generator. Making an objective IT performance assessment take an interdisciplinary view of “Run, Growth, and Growth” IT management portfolio, customer experience management, GRC, and vendor management, etc. Making a fair IT potential assessment is about evaluating how IT spend more resources doing more with information and building differentiated business competency. IT leaders must keep in mind which KPIs best measure IT capability to deliver performance and which ones better measure differentiated competency and the potential for breakthrough innovation. A set of IT performance indicators should show a clear link to C-Level executives between IT efficiency and top-line revenue generation.

When IT becomes only the mechanism for realizing a vision described by other C-level executives, it becomes a commodity. Leading CIOs must be able to convey the technological vision and drive changes proactively. Thus, assessing organizational personality, evaluating IT strength and weakness, managing company performance and maximizing business potential are all important digital management scenarios to build up a positive business working environment, and move up IT maturity from functioning to firm to delight, running full speed with less friction, and achieving high-level digital maturity to get digital ready.

Posted in: IT Performance Management,IT Transformation