Posted by admin on March 5, 2010 under Process Improvement, Technology | 
This week I was watching an early business news show on which one of the announcers made a comment about how companies had cut costs so deeply in order to survive, they were concerned about hiring employees back too soon. Profitability is still somewhat elusive, and the cost of hiring staff (especially considering the high costs of health care benefits) poses too much of a risk on the tentative nature of our corporate recoveries.
Instead, according to the reporter, companies are turning to technology investments to streamline and optimize their performance rather than rely on the “human factor”. After all, technology does not require a health plan. Or, does it?
I certainly understand the apprehension about hiring - the economic realities are still too uncertain to invest heavily in staff. However, it is just as imperative that organizations fully consider the significant investment that will be required when implementing or upgrading technology in an organization.
Even a moderate upgrade requires a significant investment in hardware and software resources, as well as human capital resources. And, without staff involvement in the project, success may truly be challenging.
One way to ensure success of your next technology project is to conduct a thorough analysis of your needs. Start by understanding your current environment, and what you plan/need to achieve. An in depth understanding of your people, current capabilities, technology, and your expectations is critical in determining where to invest. After all, if you make a bad decision by rushing into implementing technology, your technology will require a health plan of its own - a costly one in terms of time, money and wasted opportunity.
Several years ago I wrote an article on this topic. I think the ideas are still relevant and timely.
I’d like to hear your comments on this subject.
Posted by admin on February 6, 2010 under Process Improvement, Technology |
There is a lot of literature about the reasons for the abysmal success rate of technology implementation projects. We blame the project management skills, the end users (if you can imagine), management’s lack of support and/or interest and so forth.
While all these may contribute to the demise of a project, the real reason these projects fail is that they do not address the underlying business problem being solved. The first step in any technology project needs to be the careful, systematic definition and assessment of the business problem. If you cannot articulate the business problem you are addressing, you have no business even starting a project! For more, see our latest article.
Posted by admin on April 23, 2009 under Leadership, Technology |
According to Gary Beach, CIO magazine publisher emeritus, a recent survey of CIOs found that CIOs believe their IT organizations are now viewed by their CEO as more of a business enabler than a cost center.
The survey asked CIOs, on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being “IT is a cost center” and 10 being “IT is a business enabler”, how they believe their CEOs rate their IT organization. The results were a surprising 8.5 - far higher than I would have expected. Is this just wishful thinking? or reality?
I wonder how accurately this result reflects the CEOs true feelings. CIOs long to be viewed as being more strategic; however, I don’t see this reality played out in businesses. There are still issues with technology organizations being too caught up with the glitter of technology to really understand business problems and propose valuable solutions. Now, I’m not saying this is true in every organization - there are some examples of very strong business/IT alignment, but I do not believe the figures are anywhere near the results reflected in this survey.
Where are the results of this question being posed to CEOs? Until we measure their impression and understand their expectations and needs, there will continue to be a gap in alignment. Let’s stop talking about this issue, and start listening to our CEOs.
Posted by admin on March 25, 2009 under Governance, Technology |
I had an interesting discussion the other day with the former CIO of a major consumer goods manufacturer. We were discussing why we still, after 30 years of talking about it, have such a gap between business and IT.
Part of the problem is that the metrics we use to measure project success in the IT department are not related directly enough to the actual impact on the business. Most of the metrics used to evaluate IT project delivery performance are some form of:
1) did we deliver on schedule
2) did we deliver against the requirements
3) did we deliver on budget?
While these are important project execution metrics, from a business perspective, measuring on these items does not necessarily mean we were successful in delivering “business value”. Witness the number of implementations where the end users complain that the system does not perform as desired/needed.
For IT organizations to deliver truly valuable business solutions, it is critical to understand how the system implementation will:
1) impact top line growth
2) bottom line growth
3) increase liquidity
This responsibility rests not only with the business team, but also the IT team members. Each member of the project team must be able to articulate how they will be directly impacting one of the items listed above. Without that ability, there really is no project.
The challenge then becomes identifying the actual metrics used to measure, post-implementation, the impact of the system. Due to the number of variables that impact the financial performance of a company, it is difficult to attribute the changes to the system implementation. What metrics have you used to measure system implementation impact against business goals?
