Partner with your business on improving speed to market
Considerations for strategic business planning
Published: July 12, 2006
By Fawn Fitter
IT professionals: Want to do a better job facilitating your company’s strategic business planning? How about new product and service development at your company? Move away from the control mindset and toward developing speedy tools that allow business units to seize new opportunities before the competition does.
In Summary:
| • | Actively seeking out opportunities to participate in the product development cycle is one way for IT to demonstrate its ability to improve speed to market. |
| • | IT can further bolster its credibility by preparing the network for any initiative the company decides to pursue. |
| • | Specific technology investments matter less than ensuring that IT is a critical part of the overall organizational strategy. |
 | CIOs who are carrying on active technology pilot programs and moving their organizations on to new technology faster are seeing much tighter bonding within the company and a better ability to adapt to changing business conditions. |  | | Glenn Hoogerwerf
VMC Consulting | |
|
Historically, IT has not always been a reliable partner for business units trying to bring new products and services to market. Companies have for years enthusiastically discussed the importance of aligning technology and business. But all too often, IT managers are left on the sidelines of strategic business planning.
Attribute this in part to the long legacy of control demanded in the IT culture.
"Left to their own devices, IT liked to say, ‘It's magic, it's smoke and mirrors, you can't understand what we do,'" says Carl Frappaolo, executive vice president and co-founder of Delphi Group, a Perot Systems company. In fact, the Boston-based strategic IT consulting firm still encounters this attitude: The IT department at one recent client insisted on reviewing all new software through an 18-month approval process. "No wonder they couldn't innovate," Frappaolo says.
However, IT is learning to align with strategic business planning, in no small part because chief information officers (CIOs) realize they must make their departments indispensable to the business cycle in order to avoid outsourcing. IT directors and CIOs must support the chief executive, whose job is to exploit opportunities on a dime, says Glenn Hoogerwerf, chief operating officer of global technology project services firm VMC Consulting Corporation, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.
For example, at a midsize staffing company, VMC deployed Microsoft SharePoint technology to link sales records stored in multiple formats: customer relationship management (CRM) systems, Microsoft Office Excel and Word files, and PowerPoint presentations. VMC then pulled all the information into a common database using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Instead of taking weeks to spot and address sales opportunities, the staffing firm can now use past sales records to develop new services and pricing proposals immediately.
Your IT department can play a larger role in expediting time to market too. Here's how.
Insist on inclusion
Even if your company has strong cross-group communications and a culture where the business appreciates IT as a partner, IT managers may still need to educate (or remind) business executives of their role in the development cycle. One way to do this is to seek out opportunities to provide useful input, Frappaolo suggests. As an example, he cites a manufacturing firm where IT is seeking to persuade top executives that a document-management system would significantly speed product development. Knowing the executive team is reluctant to increase the technology budget without good reason, the IT staff is interviewing line managers about how document management will improve operations, and creating a presentation quantifying the results.
Assess existing systems
Does your organization have ample bandwidth, robust network security, reliable communications both internally and with suppliers, and adequate enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems? Great ideas may not make it to market without the data infrastructure to support their development. Suboptimal connectivity interferes with every step of the process, from brainstorming to product delivery, says Paul Maré, managing director of Microsoft partner Fusion Factory Ltd., a South African software and services consultancy.
Keep your eye on the company's project portfolio as it relates to your current infrastructure, and prepare a plan showing what network upgrades will be necessary for a new project. The plan should include details about how much the upgrades will cost and how much time they will require before a new project can begin.
Before creating a shopping list, explore how you can leverage your existing infrastructure to accomplish new tasks or eliminate redundancies. If you store product information in multiple databases, for example, you might create a portal to poll the databases and generate real-time reports (you can do this using Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft .NET, for instance).
Evaluate next steps
Hoogerwerf recommends an aggressive approach to adopting and adapting solutions that facilitate product development and support speed to market. "CIOs who are carrying on active technology pilot programs and moving their organizations on to new technology faster are seeing much tighter bonding within the company and a better ability to adapt to changing business conditions," he says.
Yet the specific solutions you choose may not be as important as guaranteeing the IT department's status as a vital part of the business cycle. "You want to make it," says Frappaolo, "so that the CEO, the COO, and the CFO cannot make a decision unless you are there to make it with them."
Fawn Fitter is a freelance writer based in San Francisco, specializing in business and technology. She has written for publications including Fortune Small Business, Worthwhile and Knowledge Management.
|
For affordable information management, get into the Groove For midsize businesses without the budget or IT staff to support more complex information management systems, Microsoft Office Groove 2007 may be the tool you need to improve speed to market. It creates a virtual workspace where teams can securely create and share files, manage projects, and track data and processes over the Internet from multiple locations inside and outside of your company firewall. Groove 2007 is included in Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007. |
