Tuesday, October 5, 2021

itvaluepropositions

IT value proposition is based on: “This is how we enable business growth with quality solutions in a time to market perspective.”


Organizational value is an informal term and could mean different things to different people. VALUE is not something that can easily be measured and is very subjective. IT organizations are often perceived as cost centers or back office functions only. The fact is many IT organizations are not even trying to address their value to the business as they simply have not figured out the premium methods to enable it, looking only at cost, schedule, and quality, will not fully address value and only leads to conflicts in what value is. 

Generally speaking, value is an overall measurement based on the combination of cost, schedule, quality, performance, and satisfaction of the customer, users, and stakeholders. How can IT leaders clarify IT value proposition and lead business change and transformation?

Performance excellence:
IT is the glue to integrate all crucial business elements into organizational capabilities, keep optimizing business processes to facilitate business outcomes and build an effective digital ecosystem. IT plays a crucial role in optimizing business operation management capacity with a keen eye to grasp growth opportunities, manage risks, and improve operational efficiency. Thus, IT performance excellence directly impacts the overall organizational effectiveness, agility and maturity.

IT management needs to be in the continuous tuning mode to tighten coordination and collaboration with the business partners via seamless alignment; improve IT performance through consolidation, modernization, integration, and optimization; reduce the burden on the company while trying to stay current with ever-changing technologies and exponential growth of information. IT leadership teams need to look forward and actively position the IT organization in the right place to take full advantage of opportunities and manage IT in a structural way, and continue creating the conditions for achieving IT management excellence.

Innovation competency
: To run an innovative IT organization, the more difficult challenge is not about launching successful teams, but maintaining the motivation and focus of the people to generate great ideas and solve problems innovatively. Nowadays, IT is one of the most complex puzzle pieces of innovation, businesses require IT to help drive revenue and business innovation by providing innovative products and services that the business can offer to end customers to grow revenue, or improve enterprise revenue through better customer satisfaction and loyalty.

To facilitate idea creation, the IT enabled enterprise platforms and powerful digital collaboration tools make it much easier to share ideas, trigger just-in-time innovation, harness communication, and scale up innovation best practices. IT has to be configured in a way to understand the business and orchestrate just-in-time innovation with a “living process,” by frequent evaluations, listening, and revision. Running IT as an innovative engine is truly about bringing the new perspective to grow businesses and delight customers; to both capture opportunities and manage risks timely, and become customer-centric and value-driven.

On value, on time deliveries:
Remember that IT is there to deliver the programs that the business wants and states that it needs. IT professionals should understand that there are only business initiatives and they are astute at the IT-enabled business solution with on-time delivery and measure the right things for making continuous improvement. IT supports the achievement of strategic business objectives with the priorities from an executive management perspective. With rapid changes and fierce competition, IT needs to shorten its product/services delivery cycle for speeding up and improving business adaptability. It is important to allocate time and resources to the people in charge and deliver innovative solutions to the customers on value and on time.

In reality, in many IT organizations that get stuck at the “survival mode,” the degrees of over-budget, late delivery or poor system performance conditions would reduce customer satisfaction. Dissatisfaction negatively impacts the overall value of IT products/services deliveries.Thus, the value driven IT needs to understand stakeholders’ expectations and propose a IT service/solution portfolio that corresponds to both demand and cost drivers with a focus on business priority, make an objective evaluation and track the progress of IT portfolio management to ensure on-value, on-time and on-budget delivery.

Customer satisfaction: IT has internal users who count on IT to equip them with the effective technology tools to improve productivity, innovativeness and work satisfaction; and the end customers who purchase the business’s products or services. IT plays a critical role in digitizing the touch point of customer experience and improving customer satisfaction. Deploy a range of technologies and do data-mining analysis that focus on improving the customer's experience and perception of business solutions. Always take the customer view as the basis of measurement for continuous IT deliveries, reduce the delivery cycle time and improve customer experiences.

What the customers generally want is a no-nonsense, fit-for-purpose, and hassle free solution to their needs. Show the customer that you are making a significant investment to deliver the products, services, or solutions which more closely meet their needs. Improvement in any truly customer-centric IT organization requires all team members to believe that things can be improved to run IT as a trustful business partner and provide the premium business solutions for customers.

Cost optimization: IT is one of the most expensive business investments. Total Cost of IT includes all costs 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 investing on unleashing business potential. Also, as is often the case, people focus upon the budget and not upon the value and when cost cutting occurs, it tends to be based upon department power and perception, things that often IT fail to have and manage. As the data is showing, on average, more than two third of IT budgets across the industry are being spent on fixing previous IT developments, and the percentage keeps increasing with time. Anyone that does not address fixing this problem, is a detriment to the future of the business.

The benefit of IT cost optimization is to reduce the total cost of ownership as it reduces a lot of redundancy in the business process which ultimately improves organizational agility. The challenge is to have visibility and traceability between costs and the assets consuming those costs. When selecting the right set of metrics for cost optimization, ask whether the metrics can reveal anything meaningful for the identified purpose, and ensure the management buy-in, The principle for doing cost optimization - achieving cost effectiveness without sacrificing quality.

Workforce intelligence: IT skill gaps are reality, every organization must address their common and unique skills requirements and map that out through some sort of skills/competency matrix within their organization. In practice, there's misunderstanding or miscommunication (lost in translation) in between IT talent request and recruiting searching mechanism, also, there's disconnect of IT's short term staff needs and long term talent perspectives. It’s important to identify the gap between the talent for tomorrow and skills for today. IT leaders need to create the working condition that talented people are empowered, intrinsically motivated, well trained and supported because change becomes unstoppable.

We live in an information abundant world, organizations today should have data orientation in anything they do. Talent analytics and workforce intelligence will bring IT/business leaders together across the organization to share their experience and insight wherever there is a gap in, identify the root cause of low performance and competency gaps, help to streamline and identify root causes immediately and give practical guidance for improving and ordering talent relevant data and using it in creative ways to gain predictive insight and competitive advantage. People managers start using data to ask and answer some hard questions that are at the heart of how employees contribute to business performance, more importantly, what their professional potential is, how to align their career goals with the strategic business goals, and develop next practices to attract and retain talent effectively.

Business transformation: If traditional IT is an order taker from the business partner and lagging behind the change curve of the business. Today’s IT needs to become the change agent of the business, identify opportunities for business growth and transformation wherever assessment indicates the potential benefits of change efforts, to create the “continuous improvement” organizational culture, for enabling and catalyzing the business transformation. IT-enabled business competencies such as robustness, speed, comprehensiveness, responsiveness, agility, improvement, optimization, risk intelligence, innovativeness enable their company to drive the large scale of change in a structural way.

The forward-looking organizations across industrial sectors claim they are in the information management business, and there is a high expectation of IT to drive changes and lead the digital transformation. Thus, IT should explore the furthest horizon and IT management has to work both in IT and on IT, and business transformation efforts need to be undertaken as the means of getting to a differentiated capability to accomplish defined goals and achieve multifaceted business value.

IT value proposition is based on: “This is how we enable business growth with quality solutions in a time to market perspective.” When people are at the center of organizational management, operational excellence, customer relationships, IT relevancy, capability, and brand reputation are built on. The true value of IT is created at the intersection of many management disciplines, to develop vision and strategy, to design and deliver products and services, to manage information/ knowledge, to make continuous improvement where all business processes are supported by applications, and to orchestrate business transformation.

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