Monday, August 29, 2022

Itinvestment

When board directors or senior leaders have sufficient knowledge and understanding of IT, they can make a sound judgment about IT investment and know how to assess IT performance objectively.

Information technology is the linchpin to run a contemporary organization, it's important to present IT as a value generator rather than a cost center, and scrutinize information technology investment via the business lens. 

The wise investment of advanced information technologies can be truly helpful to make information technology organizations indispensable, drive business demands such as improving business effectiveness, efficiency, increasing employee productivity, enforcing collaboration, and harnessing innovation.


An information technology investment can be validated only as the initial business case to solve certain business problems: Forward-thinking leaders empower and invest their IT boldly to be the strategic differentiator for pursuing business growth. Information technology leaders should convey a data-based presentation to the board and top executive teams in looking and appreciating the strategic value of information technology to the business. Return on investment tells the business management how well an investment repays the company.

The fact that most organizations are unable to put their head around return on investment and coherent metrics. IT is part of the business. Any investment on the business side would require a clear motivated business case. Doing detailed ROI analysis helps the management team know your organization and what you're getting for all your investments. Then you can make informed decisions moving forward. Without solid financial numbers, abstract things like business value are not very meaningful.

An return on investment analysis and a total cost ownership analysis can be done on a whole new initiative or just on enhancements:
Information technology ROI is always a controversial topic, with the difficulty of defining "value”; as there is the problem that IT spending never achieves anything in isolation and value is more than just ROI. To manage information technology as a business value creator, allocate funds and resources where they make the most sense. It's important to do in-depth ROI and TCO analysis. 

One needs to look at the models from a pure IT cost viewpoint as well as a business view. The latter determines whether or not the business should invest in the opportunity while the former determines what implementation approach to satisfy the business requirement is best and keep IT management transparent as part of solutionary. Within information technology financial management, total cost of ownership, consumption and chargeback needs to be clear to improve investment transparency. The wise investment of advanced information technologies can be truly helpful to drive business demands and build IT enabled business advantage.

Organizations have different strategies for IT investment, integrating IT investment to generate business value:
IT investment is often one of the most costly investments for running a contemporary business. The business management should decide whether or not a tech investment is worth making. The best scenario is to leverage information technology architecture, create a comprehensive capability map to bridge capability gaps and clarify business objectives for information technology investment.

One of the problems is that information technology organizations generally have a very difficult time coming to grips with the true cost of a service. To reinvent IT from a cost center to a strategic business partner, they need to start with a simple service catalog for financial management purposes and define a set of sub-services and cost elements, to clarify the IT value proposition. First understand the IT performance goal you try to achieve, make wise investment with clearly defined key performance indicators which can reflect the IT performance progress for the intermediate or long-term organizational goals.

When board directors or senior leaders have sufficient knowledge and understanding of IT, they can make a sound judgment about IT investment and know how to assess IT performance objectively. To reinvent IT from a cost center to a value generator and an innovation engine, IT leaders have to fine-tune the operational structures & functions and manage a balanced application portfolio to maximize IT return on investment and improve organizational long term competency.

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