Troy Media – By Roger Glasel
A common place misconception today that I believe is becoming more prevalent is the expectation and dependency that a technology solution alone will solve a business process problem.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Granted, I will defend the benefits of technology in today’s business, but it must be right-sized, aligned to the business goals and strategy and, most of all, managed correctly.
In some cases that I have encountered, companies fully anticipate that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software will solve their low sales challenges, and they continue to push and push for the organization to make that investment. But if an underlying business process issue is the root cause of low sales, no CRM tool in the ‘vendor world’ will save you.
In this case, if you do not fundamentally know how to market to a customer or client, even though you already have all of the information you need, no tool to synergistically manage activity between sales, marketing, and customer service will resolve that issue.
Disparate financial reporting systems
Another persistent thorn experienced by organizations recently, most likely caused by to the boom of the early 2000’s and the need to grown at unfortunately unmanageable levels, is the use of multiple, thus naturally disparate financial reporting systems. This usually happens when multiple stakeholders across an organization believe their requirements are somehow unique, and then settle on implementing solutions from previous experience with another organization.
If at any time another approach or technological solution to either a process or reporting problem is recommended, the fear is that a different system will be added which doesn’t integrate with current systems.
That is why IT governance was born. Taking a fact-based approach to how and why IT investments are made is the salvation of thousands of companies, both large and small, and is very much an accepted best practice. That is why it is recommended to standardize on a common operating system platform. An enterprise approach is more than ever warranted as companies struggle to find cost savings, while at the same time wondering why it needs so many servers in its server room. In most cases, the answer is staring right back at you.
Technology solutions enable a company’s vision. If we continue to focus on, say CRM as an example, any CIO or IT decision maker must be aware that a problem with process is very likely to occur with its implementation. When the process constraint is resolved by means of Business Process Improvement (BPI), or other process evolving methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma, then and only then can technology begin to offer the organization value in terms of productivity enhancements, manageability, streamlined business intelligence, and so forth.
Caution must be exercised, whether you are a CFO, VP of Finance, CIO, or Director of IT, however. The moment a proposal slides across your desk for bells and whistles, but is lacking on how the business must also evolve, that technology investment will most likely become the bane of your existence.
A very good friend of mine reminded me just a few weeks ago that, “. . . everything in our life is a process, right from making a cup of tea to driving to work.” If we shift our mindset to that focus, then it becomes very clear that that very approach to a business problem will ultimately serve us well and let technology be the tool it was always meant to be.
So how do we manage process? Begin by instilling a respect for IT governance by:
■Strengthening the IT and business engagement
■Making fact-based investment decisions
■Achieving financial control and transparency
■Optimizing IT assets and resources
■Managing overwhelming demand
■Prioritizing investments and control costs
■Empowering IT to deliver more business value
All the information you need
IT Governance provides all the information we need to make fact-based decisions regarding the best use of IT investments. The proposed solutions should also provide the most comprehensive and granular insight into service costs — not just project costs, but also infrastructure usage and asset costs as well as business benefit for it to be classified an enterprise and best fit solution.
By providing insight into the value of new services, you are then, and only then, able to build robust, rapidly initiate projects that will have impact your business, make investment tradeoff decisions and realign spending to where it is most needed.
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