Business responds to change every day. Customers
increasingly want more choice, speed, and quality, all at a lower total cost,
while competitors wage a
perpetual
battle to steal market share. In order to succeed in such a dynamic and
demanding world, business processes and supporting information systems must be
both stable and responsive to change, always focused on delivering value to the
customer. Unfortunately they often fall short.
Business perceptions of IT and the IT organization often
include the following concerns:
·
Complexity: Information systems are often
difficult to use, costly, and resistant to change.
·
Speed: The IT organization is often
perceived as slow moving and late in responding to high-priority requests.
·
Misdirection: The IT organization is
focused on technical issues rather than on solving business problems.
·
Foreign language: IT speaks a language
that business people don't understand, and IT often doesn't understand the
language of the business.
·
Information overload: IT generates an
overabundance of information; many workers suffer from data, e-mail and
document waste, losing countless productive hours each week.
·
Project failure: IT projects are
sometimes costly, time-consuming, late, and disruptive, while failing to
deliver expected benefits.
·
Fragmentation: There are often many
disparate, disconnected systems involved in each business process.
·
Poor data quality: Data and information
are often inaccurate, unreliable, inconsistent, untimely, or, in the worst
cases, counterproductive.
·
Inadequate decision support: Users are
often frustrated by having too much data but not enough useful information, at the
right time and in the right format, to support informed decisions.
·
Systems anarchy: Many users attempt to
control their own information with workarounds, spreadsheets, and homegrown
systems, further contributing to data fragmentation, redundancy, and poor
quality.
·
Cost focus: IT is often perceived as a
back office cost center, not an enabler of value creation or a catalyst for
innovation.
·
Unclear return on investment (ROI): The business
is often unable to measure the ROI of information systems investments, and
evaluate the quality and effectiveness of IT performance. This uncertainty
leads to a vague understanding of IT's true value to the business, which in
turn leads to uninformed investment decisions.
Now let's
consider the other perspective: the IT organization is often overloaded, and
reactive crisis management behavior is all too common. Constant change,
shifting priorities, new releases and upgrades, and the need to balance
existing and emerging technologies, all contribute to an untenable mixture of
complexity and volatility. There is usually more work than IT could ever
complete; some companies report three to five-year backlogs. And through it
all, IT is tasked with keeping information systems, and the business, up and
running at all times, while rigorously controlling costs. This often creates the
atmosphere of a no-win scenario within IT.
Common IT concerns and challenges include:
·
Endless "firefighting": The
amount of unplanned work often exceeds planned work, which is unsatisfying,
exhausting, and ultimately not sustainable.
·
Unclear system requirements: End users
can't always articulate what they want and often ask for more than they need.
·
Conflicting priorities: Business
stakeholders are often unable to agree on priorities, so IT is caught in the
middle with unclear goals, budgets, and timelines, having no choice but to
pragmatically make important priority decisions based on incomplete
information.
·
Lack of engagement: IT is often brought
into projects after important strategic and tactical business decisions have
already been made.
·
Resource thrashing: Due to unpredictable
demand, magnified by unclear and shifting priorities, IT staff are frequently
switched between projects, causing changeover costs, lost productivity, quality
problems, frustration, and fatigue.
·
Excessive automation: Rather than
eliminating or at least simplifying wasteful processes, they are often
automated, creating additional layers of system complexity and increasing total
cost of ownership.
·
Poor data quality: This creates
additional errors, rework, and other downstream consequences, and is often
caused by lack of end user training and documentation, and inadequate process
design and controls.
·
Scheduling of shared
resources and services: A constant challenge, since specialized resources
(human and other assets) are often shared among multiple projects and
operations, each with competing priorities, causing bottlenecks and scheduling
delays.
·
Regulatory requirements: These can add
layers of non-value-adding activity. The business often focuses on after-the-fact
reporting and control measures, rather than creating high-quality, consistent,
and naturally compliant processes to begin with.
·
Outsourcing: The business may believe
that outsourcing administrative processes and IT services will reduce costs.
However, decision makers may not fully understand the distinction between
commodity processes and those that neither offer competitive differentiation
and strategic advantage, nor realize that outsourcing may have unintended consequences
by restricting agility.
·
Budget constraints: There is a natural
tendency to focus on IT cost cutting, rather than waste reduction—emphasizing
value creation, innovation, and enterprise performance improvement.
