Achieving High IT Maturity via Shareholders’ Participation

The more stakeholders can impact IT-enabled business initiatives capable of seriously affecting their work or lives, the better chance the change will achieve or exceed the expectations. 

IT is often one of the biggest investments that the business ever makes. To improve IT maturity and convince shareholders about IT value, CIOs need to be able to listen to a wide range of opinions and approaches, achieve a high return on investment by enforcing shareholders’ participation, and convince them of new IT initiatives with solid business justification by demonstrating the potential benefits to meet the strategy.

Building strong relationships with stakeholders: In many global or multinational organizations, the challenges of stakeholder involvement are real for IT-enabled business initiatives or the Change Management effort. A formal business requirement initiatives checklist includes such as enterprise mission and stakeholder needs analysis, enterprise system requirement development, and management. The customers, users, and all stakeholders including suppliers, partners, and all internal functions hold a stake in the requirements.

As business requirements are gathered and managed and discussed with executives and teams, focus on those requirements whose improvement has the most benefit to the business. IT management should figure out effective ways to ensure that varying stakeholders are engaged and performing their appropriate roles. Having built strong relationships with stakeholders makes the listening process simpler and any adjustments in approach easier to execute. In fact, the stakeholder involvement has positive implications at each stage of the people-centric business efforts.

Stakeholder involvement and engagement: IT management is not just the business of the IT department, but the responsibility of the entire company. There are a lot of changes that are unpleasant, and often IT-driven business initiatives are complex and challenging, stakeholder involvement and engagement nearly always make these difficult paths easier to tread. There are ever greater abilities of IT to create shareholders’ engagement for achieving desired business outcomes, such as customer satisfaction, employee engagement, business partnership, financial health, and shareholder delight, etc.

To improve IT manageability, facilitating requirements negotiations is very beneficial to keeping everyone involved, the manager should never lose sight of all requirements and relationships, and to make sure those requirements whose improvement has the most benefit to the business. If shareholders valued innovation more, then, more often than not, they would value companies that devote more resources toward future innovation than those that optimize short term profits. Ultimately, the business can reach the next cycle of growth cycle and management maturity.

Measure-based communication with stakeholders: To keep IT relevant, and reinvent IT as a strategic business partner, identify the purpose of the information, and the stakeholders who will be interested in the measurement. The right metrics can be helpful to track progress in an IT-driven improvement initiative. Without measurements, it can be hard to tell whether attempted improvements make the situation better or worse.

If you want to succeed as an IT leader, you need your department to succeed and that starts and ends with understanding and trust. Conversely, without trust, it is difficult to correct courses on projects because it’s too easy for both sides to start making excuses. Therefore, it is critical to define a set of measures which should cover all areas that contribute to business value creation. The measure-based communication helps stakeholders understand what is going on, and improves the overall business transparency.

The more stakeholders can impact IT-enabled business initiatives capable of seriously affecting their work or lives, the better chance the change will achieve or exceed the expectations. To improve IT manageability, often it requires some stakeholder management to make them understand what you are set to do, and what a reasonable expectation is. It is also up to IT leaders to interpret and leverage the stakeholders’ expectations and come up with an expectation that you believe is suitable for your role, focus on communication, transparency, and acts of integrity on the part of management in creating organizational synergy.

Posted in: Innovation,IT Innovation,IT Transformation