Assessing IT Needs
All business projects stand the greatest chance of success if they are planned with care, and set out with clear goals in mind.
| • | Communicate IT's contribution to the business at board level | | • | Produce ongoing metrics to demonstrate the value of all projects | | • | Assess whether the IT department requires more resources, or just better deployment of existing resources | | • | Encourage the perception of IT as an enabler |
|
IT is no exception. The day-to-day pressures of running a mid-sized business mean that IT decisions do sometimes have to be made on the fly, especially when it comes to reacting to the demands of customers or suppliers.
But even where businesses have to adjust their IT plans to outside demands, investment in technology will be more effective when a company has a good understanding of its own IT needs.
Document your business processes
Clearly, there is more to making an assessment of IT needs than producing a list of software and hardware purchases, important though these are.
To maximise their return on investment in technology, companies need to look beyond the technology, and examine the task or business process they are looking to automate, such as order fulfilment or producing financial reports. The IT industry itself is increasingly thinking this way: the talk is of services, rather than simply running IT systems.
For new business processes, this can be relatively straightforward, as it is likely that IT will be a key part of the project from the outset.
Matters are more complicated for established business processes. In a mature company, it is highly likely that IT has been brought into play in stages as technology has developed. The result can be an end-to-end process that is less than efficient.
Even where businesses have been able to automate a complete business process in one go, they might not have had the time, or capacity, to look at the business process itself in detail.
Mid-sized businesses rarely have the luxury of shutting down parts of the operation in order to deploy new IT systems, nor the resources to develop new systems in parallel to existing infrastructure. It is often that much easier just to apply IT to existing business processes – and any inefficiencies they contains -- rather than re-engineer the process in order to take maximum advantage of technology.
But if companies plan to invest in IT, especially if that investment will be significant, it makes both practical and financial sense to analyse business processes first.
Key questions are how do those processes work, how do they use technology today and how effective is that technology in helping those who run the business process? The shop floor, as much as the boardroom, can provide the answers.
Establishing a dialogue between IT and the business
The next – and critical – step is to establish a dialogue between the business and IT. When IT projects fail, it is as often because of a lack of communications, or because of misunderstandings about the project's goals, as it is because of technology.
It is no different when it comes to assessing IT needs, either for a specific project or for the business as a whole. IT managers are responsible for specifying a technical solution to a business issue. They can only do this if they have all the relevant information to hand, and understand clearly what management in the line of business want to achieve.
Often, IT departments are structured according to hardware or software products: there might a database architect, a storage specialist, a server specialist and a manager responsible for desktop support. Business problems rarely fit such a technical categorisation.
Gartner, the IT industry research organisation, points out that there are three key stakeholders in each IT project: the business process owners, the financial "stewards", such as a company's finance director, and the IT department itself.
The role of the IT director or IT consultant is to map the business process on to the business' IT needs, and then produce the technical requirements to build the solution. An on-going, two-way dialogue really is essential for support.
"The ability of IT and the business to understand each other is an issue," acknowledges Jim Campbell, a director of IT specialists Diagonal Consulting. "If IT is to support the business, both sides need to bridge that gap."
Putting IT in the wider business context
One way of bringing IT and the business closer together is to bring IT staff into business projects at an earlier stage. This increases the chance that technology can improve the business process – rather than simply being used to automate an existing way of working.
But the role of the IT director goes beyond involvement in business-led projects. The IT department must hold on to responsibility for core, architectural decisions including key areas such as security and mobility.
The CIO also has to allocate and manage internal IT resources, and consider the ongoing cost and support implications of any business project.
This is not to say that the IT department should become a barrier to innovation – as some line of business managers might feel – but that the IT director needs to maintain an overview of all the IT-enabled projects that are planned or taking place at any one time.
This critical function prevents duplication of resources, "mission creep", where a project's goals constantly move, and helps to ensure that projects keep to security and compliance standards.
Central co-ordination also makes it easier to apply a standard methodology for calculating return on investment for IT. "A lot of companies believe that if they spend £1 on IT they will receive £1.20 back. That may be the case, but it might also be the case that they would see a better return spending that money in another part of the business," says Diagonal's Jim Campbell.
Most importantly of all, the CIO needs to assess IT needs in the context of the business' overall strategy. If that strategy is to promote growth, then a business unit's project that is driven primarily by a need to cut costs might not be appropriate. If a business unit wants to drive forward a project that requires mobility, it will not help if it does so regardless of compliance or security requirements.
And the IT director will often be called on to act as a referee between the conflicting needs of different business units.
 | About the author
Stephen Pritchard has been a journalist since 1990, and specialises in business, technology and finance. He has become one of the UK's foremost journalists on IT issues, and writes for a range of national and international publications, including the Financial Times, the Independent on Sunday and Information Age.
|
Subscribe
to feed
