Effective IT management means understanding every island of operation and every workflow process smoothly.
Due to the increasing pace of change, the exponential growth of information, and fierce competition, IT plays a critical role in leading digital transformation.
The value-based IT management can leverage useful tools like IT architecture to gain a holistic view of IT cost, complexity, or footprint, be able to increase visibility, and shape varying options to improve IT manageability.
Total Cost of IT: Besides the human cost, IT is one of the most expensive business investments, and many IT organizations have been perceived as a cost center. Total Cost of IT includes all costs associated with building and operating a healthy IT environment, such as workforce costs, hardware/software/license costs, systems costs, procurement costs, long-term support costs, etc. In reality, many IT organizations spend most of their resources and budget on “keeping the lights on” without providing a differentiated business advantage. The structure of budget estimating for big IT projects will tend to under-estimate the time and cost. Thus, doing cost/benefits analysis is important to improve IT effectiveness and efficiency. All IT spending must be looked at through an investment lens, providing a framework for thoughtful and informed IT investment decisions.
To reinvent IT as a value creator, a business stakeholder has to be accountable for realizing the benefits, not IT. Total IT impact and total value should get more attention rather than just cost. IT management should learn and explore different methodologies to present IT performance and potential. You should estimate the time and cost for all the project activities that you can think of and include a consideration of the interconnections. Thoughtful cost-cutting and investment with an eye towards the future are imperative. IT projects more closely aligned to IT Architecture generally benefit more from financial factors such as economies of scale.
IT complexity: Information Technology is by nature, complex. Technically, the complexity of aggregate layers of every internal IT system is a burden that often causes conflicts and decelerates business speed. But IT system complexity can be managed via analyzing the impact of IT complexity on a system such as processes, customers, infrastructure, etc, and doing consolidation, modernization, integration, and optimization, etc, continuously.
There are two sides of IT. The front side of IT products or services facing customers should always be intuitive, but the side behind the scene is often complex. IT is complex, it doesn't mean that IT should continue to complicate the matters or increase unnecessary complexity without discipline. You can not deliver IT value without "de-complexitizing" and make transparent what is being delivered and how or what is being delivered. As part of and in concert with the top management team. IT simplifies business processes by leveraging IT architecture as a facilitating and navigating tool, which helps a great deal in improving predictability, making it easier to manage expectations, and improving its manageability and effectiveness.
IT footprint: IT is expensive and energy-consuming. Waste of resources is costly. IT carbon footprint impacts organizational efficiency. In fact, efficiency has been a key internal driver for sustainable practices and is the low hanging fruit when moving beyond compliance and obligation. In many organizations that are getting stuck at the lower level of maturity, a key piece of information—information around environmental and social concerns, has been missing from most business operations. Sustainability isn’t integrated into existing key processes & performance management systems. The leadership sets sustainability as too low a priority. IT department is disconnected from the rest of the organization or is too low to be influential, the organization lacks the right capabilities or skills to manage sustainability, etc.
Reuse and reduction of waste reduce cost and creates new revenue streams to impact both bottom-line and top-line business growth. IT leaders need to become advocates and educators for corporate-wide environmental sustainability initiatives and also transcribes a path that converts outside concerns into inside engagement, reducing energy use & waste & emissions in operations, managing corporate reputation for sustainability, or proactively responding to regulatory constraints or opportunities. Sustainability should be embedded into key business processes and business makes the decision with an integrated view that blends financial, environmental, and social performance. IT can play a leading role in improving corporate sustainability performance to ensure the long-term economic success of the enterprise.
Effective IT management means understanding every island of operation and every workflow process smoothly. Companies that lacked the skills to manage information technology effectively suffered compared with competitors that had mastered those skills. By using IT architecture or other handy tools, IT can scrutinize cost, complexity, or footprint, become outside-in customer-driven, being transformed from a builder to an integrator, from a plumber to an orchestrator; from a service provider to a business solutionary, from a cost center to a value generator.
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