IT and Business Alignment

It is so important that if you are using ICT in your business that you understand what that ICT solution is doing or not doing for your business. It is important because it is so easy to spend money on all of the "Magpie" features of an ICT solution and not get any benefit for your business at all.

Why do we need to consider this? When making a business successful we have to take measured risks when investing to grow that business. Is saving money on ICT always a wise thing to do when the power of an ICT solution may not be fully realised? How do we know when an ICT solution's potential is fully realised? I put it to you, that it will be close to being fully realised when we know what it is that is being achieved by that "solution". We will know what is being achieved by that "ICT solution" when we are able to get results from it that can be directly linked back to our business objectives.

If we consider a managed "Common Operating Environment" which is often touted as best practice in the ICT Industry, simply put this is about reducing cost mainly. However, I believe that this can also be attributed to driving revenue increases as well, simply because if a COE is done right (many will ask what is right, that is another line of thought) it rmoves a whole lot of pain from the user experience so that a user is able to more effectively produce output relevant to your business.

This is quite a simple concept that is often over complicated because the features of the technology are dived into without considering why the business may or may not need them. Lets for a moment consider the need to use a policy to enforce your web browser to default to an internal intranet site that is not updated often enough or is static adding no value to the user experience. The time and effort to make this work is pointless if the intranet site or indeed internet site is not adding value to the end user experience. I know that this is a small thing, but all of the small things that attract us "ICT Magpies" add up over time which can translate into a large amount of effort and in turn "cash" to implement with no real business driven value.

Consider this, does the simple printer queue that was created for you to print out that proposal or product design actually make sense to you? My print queues, last time I looked, meant absolutely nothing to me or lacked a desciption that aided me in getting to the right printer for the task that I had to do. I then had to speak with the helpdesk who coudln't even tell me what I was looking for, funny that. This is a great example at a simple level of how the technology implementation didn't give any consideration to how the business may have needed to interact with it. How do we overcome this and make even the simple things line up with a business requirement????