It’s often said that the problem with IT is that it is disconnected from and out of step with the business. This is interesting because, very often, they are the only people who actually understand how the business operates from end to end.
One of the things I have often found when dealing with organisations is that the real gap is the one that exists between the executive management team and the operational management layers. The difference between the strategic thinking and getting the job done is about the widest of any you find in mid to large organisations. Where IT often gets caught is walking the tightrope between the two.
It’s easy to get caught in the crossfire, or to appear as though you aren’t quite on the same page as either of these camps as you try to introduce ideas and solutions that satisfy both.
The role of IT is not simple: Keep the lights on, keep the work flowing, manage the information, support continual improvement in effectiveness and efficiency and then provide reporting mechanics that demonstrate how well the business is delivering on its goals. More recently a new facet – that of providing the key interfaces between the customers and the business has propelled IT and the systems, software and infrastructure they support right to the heart of the organisation.
The question is which goals to address – getting the work out, keeping the customers happy or delivering on the strategy.
The difference between average and great generally comes down to a few key differences in approach and this starts with an understanding of the business model…from the customer’s perspective.
Let’s start with a simple question – what is it that you do differently that makes customers want to deal with you? This is really the one key question when looking at changing or evolving a business model. Apart from regulatory or compliance issues, this should be the key driver behind the design of your processes and the systems that support them. You want to remove latency so you can improve customer service, you want to reduce cost to make more money to invest in the customer experience, you want to increase your quality to drive customer satisfaction and ultimately retention.
Your strategy will be aimed at driving growth and becoming the biggest / best / only / most prolific / most forward thinking business in your sector. You will do this by delivering against customer expectations in the areas of innovation, quality and service. Operational and strategic objectives should be aligned at this level, delivering against these goals, but the devil is in the detail.
The job of a technology consulting organisation is three fold…firstly - identify what the business model needs to look like (or change to) in order to deliver the strategy. Secondly – examine how the current technology is deployed and how well this can support the objectives and the new model, either in its current form or if it was better utilised. Finally, identify what the ideal technology roadmap should look like to support the growth of the organisation over the next 3-5 years.
This isn’t about detailed mapping of every process, or deep down in the areas of database consolidation or data management; it’s not about unified communication or virtualisation or in fact any of the major technology initiatives that many businesses are working through today. We are talking here at a level that will give the teams who are executing these tasks the context for their work – the reason why things need to happen mapped to real business drivers and with both an ROI and a clear statement of the risks of not acting.
This is real technology alignment – understanding how technology needs to be deployed to underpin your business model, deliver your objectives and be seen as truly value add to the future of the organisation – and as a critical success factor for everything the business is trying to achieve.
Value exists only so far as there is understanding. If you want the business to see value in what you do, make sure you understand how the world looks to everyone else and then explain what you do in their terms – how it will benefit the customer, and where it fits in taking the business you have today into the organisation you want to run tomorrow.One final thought – RISK is one of the biggest factors in business decision making. The risks of making a change are often under-researched and over simplified. This is bad enough until you consider that the risks of NOT making a change are normally not even considered. Sometimes, not taking a risk can be the biggest risk of all. This is the subject of one of our latest white papers: Risk in Business Decision Making. Register now and download this white paper at http://www.keyedin.com/.
