To soothe the management pain point, IT has to expand its impact in every dimension to improve the company’s operational excellence, business responsiveness, performance, flexibility, digital fluency, and maturity.
To maximizing digital potential, IT needs to engage with the business units to find out what the pain points are and to identify opportunities for developing new products services or improving/optimizing current ones, expand its impact in every dimension to improve IT performance and maturity.
Cost Overrun: IT investment is costly. The IT cost can be categorized into IT operational cost, IT vendor cost or people cost, financials, technical debt, or a calculation of the cost to fix quality problems, etc. IT has limited budgets, many IT organizations have very little insight into their cost structures and who is consuming the assets. Oftentimes, they have no idea where they are spending their money on and assume it is mainly being spent on items that are actually much lower on the priority list. The cost overrun will cause IT failures, and one of the root causes of why business partners perceive IT as a cost center.
To fix such a pain point, IT management should set the right priority, gain the visibility and traceability between costs and the assets consuming those costs, and avoid waste by not building non-value adding features. Make sure that every new technology adopted must facilitate business but also bring down the incremental cost of growth and the time to market.
No business involvement: Many say that the battle between business and IT is still on, the business does not wish to learn about technology and invite IT to the big table for brainstorming the strategy, or deal with the IT department. IT too often doesn't take the needs of the business into account as well. Business is at odds with IT when they feel that IT isn't solving problems. In many cases, IT hinders business through restrictions and so forth. Put simply, the silo mentality or bureaucratic management style causes management pain.
To remove cultural, organizational, or systemic obstacles and fix the pain point, the business needs to learn IT, IT needs to engage with the business units to find out what the pain points really are. This can only be achieved by constant engagement and both sides seeing the other as a "partner" rather than an adversary. There is a co-dependency that should be recognized in a mature, respectful manner that facilitates the strategic goals and objectives of the enterprise. Technology should be an enabler, not an end in and of itself. IT departments need to reach out to business leaders and find ways to enable and work together to deliver “competitive capability” as many businesses will plateau without IT.
No Innovation: Complication limits innovation and historical lack of success in IT innovation initiative compounds the situation and causes IT management pain points. Many traditional IT organizations act as a controller only to “keep the light on” and even stifle innovation. More specifically, lack of innovation is perhaps due to analysis paralysis, narrow thinking - not leveraging the collective brainpower of strategic vendor partnerships, lack of understanding of the capabilities/resources, or lack of outside-in approaches. Those who overlook IT as an innovation driver should be blamed for lack of business innovation when you consider the robust new technology prospects and pervasive influence.
IT is the custodian of solutions and data assets that can be applied in new and different ways to drive innovation. IT is able to integrate all-important business elements such as process, technology, and talent into the cohesive and differentiated innovation capability. Aside from treating innovation initiatives like typical IT projects that are constrained by quick ROI, the long term perspective is to see innovation as a system, capable of delivering organization-wide capability.
Delayed Projects: There are different types of IT projects which require different strategies and methodologies, levels of executive sponsorship, constraint prioritization, project organization, risk acceptance, stakeholder engagements, and PM maturity. Using the wrong combination of these factors with the wrong project type or unexpected delay usually leads to project failure and cause IT management pain points. Also, the value of a project in terms of returns deteriorates as the project progresses when the assumptions/predictions made at the start are not evaluated at appropriate milestones.
Given the volatile nature of technology and the business ecosystem, the traditional method of comparing IT project results with the plan at the end of the project should be given up. The check needs to be done at intervals and realign the efforts as per the project progress. These checks are early warning systems that help in re-assessment of objectives and appropriate realignment, to ensure on-time and on value delivery consistently.
Gauging IT success has a multitude of focuses such as customer satisfaction, the fiscal health of IT organization, the success rate of IT delivery, and overall IT capacity and capability. To soothe the management pain point, IT has to expand its impact in every dimension to improve the company’s operational excellence, business responsiveness, performance, flexibility, digital fluency, and maturity.
To fix such a pain point, IT management should set the right priority, gain the visibility and traceability between costs and the assets consuming those costs, and avoid waste by not building non-value adding features. Make sure that every new technology adopted must facilitate business but also bring down the incremental cost of growth and the time to market.
No business involvement: Many say that the battle between business and IT is still on, the business does not wish to learn about technology and invite IT to the big table for brainstorming the strategy, or deal with the IT department. IT too often doesn't take the needs of the business into account as well. Business is at odds with IT when they feel that IT isn't solving problems. In many cases, IT hinders business through restrictions and so forth. Put simply, the silo mentality or bureaucratic management style causes management pain.
To remove cultural, organizational, or systemic obstacles and fix the pain point, the business needs to learn IT, IT needs to engage with the business units to find out what the pain points really are. This can only be achieved by constant engagement and both sides seeing the other as a "partner" rather than an adversary. There is a co-dependency that should be recognized in a mature, respectful manner that facilitates the strategic goals and objectives of the enterprise. Technology should be an enabler, not an end in and of itself. IT departments need to reach out to business leaders and find ways to enable and work together to deliver “competitive capability” as many businesses will plateau without IT.
No Innovation: Complication limits innovation and historical lack of success in IT innovation initiative compounds the situation and causes IT management pain points. Many traditional IT organizations act as a controller only to “keep the light on” and even stifle innovation. More specifically, lack of innovation is perhaps due to analysis paralysis, narrow thinking - not leveraging the collective brainpower of strategic vendor partnerships, lack of understanding of the capabilities/resources, or lack of outside-in approaches. Those who overlook IT as an innovation driver should be blamed for lack of business innovation when you consider the robust new technology prospects and pervasive influence.
IT is the custodian of solutions and data assets that can be applied in new and different ways to drive innovation. IT is able to integrate all-important business elements such as process, technology, and talent into the cohesive and differentiated innovation capability. Aside from treating innovation initiatives like typical IT projects that are constrained by quick ROI, the long term perspective is to see innovation as a system, capable of delivering organization-wide capability.
Delayed Projects: There are different types of IT projects which require different strategies and methodologies, levels of executive sponsorship, constraint prioritization, project organization, risk acceptance, stakeholder engagements, and PM maturity. Using the wrong combination of these factors with the wrong project type or unexpected delay usually leads to project failure and cause IT management pain points. Also, the value of a project in terms of returns deteriorates as the project progresses when the assumptions/predictions made at the start are not evaluated at appropriate milestones.
Given the volatile nature of technology and the business ecosystem, the traditional method of comparing IT project results with the plan at the end of the project should be given up. The check needs to be done at intervals and realign the efforts as per the project progress. These checks are early warning systems that help in re-assessment of objectives and appropriate realignment, to ensure on-time and on value delivery consistently.
Gauging IT success has a multitude of focuses such as customer satisfaction, the fiscal health of IT organization, the success rate of IT delivery, and overall IT capacity and capability. To soothe the management pain point, IT has to expand its impact in every dimension to improve the company’s operational excellence, business responsiveness, performance, flexibility, digital fluency, and maturity.
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