The Business & IT View

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.