Business Related IT Strategy
A Gartner Group research study indicated that over 80% of technology projects do not deliver as promised. It sited lack of a comprehensive strategy as the main reason for this problem.
One would be hard pressed to come across an organization, that does not perceive that some of their IT projects have not delivered on the anticipated ROI (Return on Investment), or that the ROI was short lived, due to the necessity for change in technology.
Our experience tells us that this phenomenon can be attributed to several factors, including lack of a comprehensive strategy, inadequate requirements, ambiguous expectations, and poor execution.
Take as an example, an organization that migrates to a computerized (possibly Web-Based) merchandise ordering system, without fully integrating with its order fulfillment division, resulting in a larger backlog of unprocessed orders, prone to more errors, and unsatisfied clients.
Our individual and collective experience has shown that any consulting firm, even when attacking a specific problem area, should have a good understanding of the big picture.
We believe that IT starts with making sure that all technology initiatives serve one or multiple business goals and objectives. Furthermore it is important that there are methods in place that can quantify the level of the contribution of every initiative, on an enterprise-wide accepted measurement scale. This has lead to the development of our own e-Strategy. Adherence to this methodology, on an on-going basis, will close the gap between business management, and technology, and will allow business goals to drive technology initiatives.
How does it work?
In order to ensure that technology goals are serving business initiatives, we have to start with business goals. We interview with company management and stakeholders, and review any existing business, and operations plans. From this information, we determine business objectives and principals, and we quantify them mathematically, using our methodology.
Then we review the company business process threads, and determine within each thread, who are the customers (internal and external), who are the service providers (internal and external), who are the stakeholders (internal and external), and who are the business complimentors (internal and external). For each business thread, we determine where and how technology can help. Each technology solution is determined and labeled as a possible initiative.
We examine each initiative as to how well it serves each of the business principals, and using our methodology, mathematically calculate its worth. Then, we determine the relationship between different initiatives. We also calculate a collective score for related initiatives.
We proceed to compare the collective score to the sum of the individual scores for related initiatives, and determine the final list of initiatives.
If an organization is truly a forward thinker, one last step would be to reevaluate the business threads, assuming that the selected initiatives were implemented, in order to get a vision of the future operations, and even reexamine the current initiatives based on the new landscape.
