Running Digital IT as Business Performance and Productivity Booster

Highly effective IT management exists within a business to improve productivity, increase revenue, reduce costs, optimize business solutions, and accelerate business performance. 

Information & technology management is not for its own sake, but to deliver quality services and solutions that drive business growth and improve organizational maturity. Improving productivity and accelerating business performance are some noble business goals behind running a digital IT organization. This includes all aspects of the company, such as information management, logistics, application throughput, employee engagement, and overall health of the organization, etc. But more specifically, how to run digital IT as business productivity and performance booster?

Do the multifactor productivity/performance analysis: There is two level analysis: The first is about a productivity ratio at a macro level, and the second, it’s about determining what portion of any productivity gains are due entirely to IT investments. The IT department provides guidance, support, assistance, and direction in the application and adoption of information technology solutions in support of business objectives, improve business productivity and performance. At the strategic level, senior executives focus on the top line business revenue growth. When they recognize that IT is roughly coupled with the business strategy, with tangible measurement of improving performance and productivity, IT has the better chance to be perceived as a business partner, rather than a cost center. IT needs to be measured based on how it can help business identify true cost savings, workflow optimization, additional revenue growth opportunities, and process efficiency. Determining what contribution IT investments make to higher productivity is a little more complex and probably requires some sort of multifactor productivity analysis, data, and time, where the productivity increase can only be attributed to IT, all other things being the same. The multifactor productivity analysis would also examine the process to determine what element of production made the employees more productive, a change in policy, training, efficient tools, etc, with the goal to take a structural way for improving productivity.

Productivity, automation, quality, performance, and employee engagement are all interconnected: Digital technologies are lightweight, powerful, intuitive, and fast. Organizations today have to aggressively leverage digital technologies, platforms, and tools as the enabler of communication, collaboration, social interaction and forward-thinking. It’s also important to automate the logistic part of the business to further improve productivity, performance, and quality. Automation is needed for achieving business efficiency by balancing demand and supply. The first stage in the journey to automation must be to examine core business processes and identify how they can be designed more efficiently and how they connect to other processes, in order to run streamlined and profitable operations. Employee engagement is important to drive competitive business advantage as well. Engagement is about employees willing to give discretionary effort, wants to stay, and is always looking for ways to improve individual and team performance, increase productivity and achieve high-quality business results. In fact, workforce satisfaction does affect productivity. Productivity is the outcome of how you engage a group of employees, and how they engage each other to achieve higher performance.

Keep in mind, the "measurement" of productivity, not productivity itself often has blind spots: Sometimes, the measurement of productivity does not relate to effectiveness, because business managers keep on asking employee productivity instead of focusing on getting things to work correctly. The performance indicators show productivity improvements, but no real business improvements are achieved. Effective IT management means understanding every island of operation and every workflow process. It is through this comprehensive understanding that IT would be able to help the business improve performance and productivity by measuring the result from an outside-in business perspective. If business and IT understand each other and IT ought to be able to articulate their value in terms the other C-levels understand, which for the most part is a tangible financial measurement, in addition to whatever intangible benefits it provides, then, IT is on the right track to becoming the business productivity and performance booster.

Highly effective IT management exists within a business to improve productivity, increase revenue, reduce costs, optimize business solutions, manage or mitigate risks and assist with statutory corporate compliance. The goal-driven IT should keep improving effectiveness, efficiency, agility, innovation, flexibility, and scalability, and the overall business maturity.

Posted in: Digital Master,IT Transformation