Whether or not their organizations realize an adequate return from technology investments.

Effectively implemented and managed business capabilities can make an organization more productive and profitable.

Business capabilities not planned and managed effectively, or that do not satisfy an organization’s business needs, can sap an organization’s ability to compete, resulting in:

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  Increased total cost of ownership (TCO).
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  Decreased productivity.
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  Disruptions in customer service.
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  Poor customer experience.
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  Low employee morale.

Gartner provides the following key insights for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of IT:

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  Effective technology–business engagement can increase technology performance, such as project on-time/on-budget delivery and technology-enabled business growth or efficiency, by up to 54 percent.
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  Only 40 Percent of IT – business teams are highly engaged.
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  People skills and business understanding are significant drivers of engagement.
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  Frequent, formal conversations about strategic issues and the IT–business relationship drive engagement.
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  Strengthen the IT–business interface through clearly defined roles and behaviors.

IT–business engagement is “an enduring, collaborative relationship between technology and business partners where the goal is increased business and IT technology performance.”

An essential element of business success is a good strategy and plan.

Every critical business capability should have a roadmap that defines projects and resources (people, time, and CAPEX/OPEX) required to achieve successful business outcomes.

A joint business operations - capability roadmapping process typically results in a three-year business capability plan. This roadmap also defines critical transition points that guide business teams in exploiting existing and future capabilities.

A one-year operational or tactical roadmap defines projects and quantifies resources at a more detailed level to execute against.

A practical roadmap needs to:

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  Be developed and maintained by integrated business operations and capability teams.
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  Ensure technology and other investments directly support business priorities.
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  Provide a “balanced” portfolio of projects, e.g., strategic (high risk/high reward) and Operational (keep the business running effectively and efficiently).
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  Quickly adapt to changing business needs and environments.

Manage and prioritize business opportunities as a basis for allocating scarce organization resources (people, time, CAPEX/OPEX). Some organizations refer to this process as Demand Management. This organization-wide process balances the high demand for technology services with constrained resources (people, time, CAPEX/OPEX).

The Demand Management Process:

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  Prioritizes and approves business opportunities for capability/project work.
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  Balances workload by evaluating capability/project priorities against resource (people, time, CAPEX/OPEX) capacity.
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  Develops an initial plan for sourcing required resources.
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  Confirms alignment of work with business strategy.
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  Facilitates the effective initiation of projects, including approval of the business case, estimates, funding, people, and project plans as appropriate.

Documented standards and guidelines provide an organization with:

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  Clear roles and responsibilities for executive and functional leaders, business users, and the technology function in planning, delivering, using, and supporting information systems.
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  Standard technologies and architecture governance for the organization that lowers risk and the total cost of ownership (TCO) of business capabilities.

Think of architecture like a blueprint of a house that defines each room size and their adjacencies to each other, connection to standard utilities like water, electric, materials, and construction standards.

This governance process:

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  Approves the blueprint of what needs to be built and deployed, how it will be built and deployed, and the resources (people, time, CAPEX/OPEX), technology, and solutions required to succeed.
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  Confirms the solution integrates with other systems and processes within the organization.
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  Verifies that the hardware, software, and methods are consistent with organization technology standards. A compelling business case can support exceptions to standards. Incorporate a thorough risk assessment as part of a standards exception request.

Consider technology standards analogous to a municipal “building code” for constructing buildings.

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  Technology standards provide an organization's "building code" for developing and deploying systems.
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  This is important to leverage existing skills and knowledge within the organization and minimize a solution's total cost of ownership.

New hardware, software, and methods chosen by a project but are not considered standard within an organization typically result in higher cost, more risk, and potentially less solution stability.

Measuring business satisfaction with technology services and outcomes should be an ongoing process.

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  This process can take many forms, e.g., a weekly random poll of IT users, monthly or quarterly surveys, project or post-project surveys, etc.
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  IT should share the results with executive and functional business leaders and teams.

It’s important to ensure business end-users are satisfied with the delivery of IT services.

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  Identify services that score poorly.
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  Business and IT should develop action plans to improve service levels. At business and IT leadership meetings, these action plans, status, and resolutions should be a standing agenda item.

This process also reinforces the business end-user as a key constituent of IT and, therefore, a key evaluator of the effectiveness of IT services.

It’s essential to compare satisfaction surveys with actual IT performance metrics delivered by the following critical process – Service Level Management.

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  This is important to identify and address any perception–reality gaps.
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  Sometimes, so-called “IT bashing” takes on its own life without considering any actual, quantitative performance metrics that may show that IT is delivering and/or exceeding agreed-to performance levels.

Service level management embodies operational management controls, a discipline that ensures IT services are delivered through effective management and control of the IT resources.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs), or Service Level Expectations (SLEs), are critical components of Service Level Management.

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  SLAs represent “contractual” commitments between technology partners and the business for significant applications and services and may specify penalties when actual results fall below agreed-to service levels.
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  SLEs represent “expectation” commitments between technology partners and businesses. However, SLEs don’t include any financial penalties, etc.

Examples of the types of performance specified in SLAs and SLEs include:

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  Application performance parameters such as availability, response, and processing times.
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  Targeted processing windows such as application batch processing completion times.
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  Network performance parameters such as response time and network availability.
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  Incident management, such as turnaround times for help desk ticket resolution.
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  Change management processes that ensure only business-approved changes are deployed to production application environments.

SLAs define what is essential to the business regarding service and support. They also provide a framework to support more effective technology decision-making based on organizational priorities.

Technology partners should conduct regular reviews with the business to review actual technology performance metrics vs. SLA commitments. Identify and resolve the root cause of problems and where metrics fall short of goals.

A project methodology is a documented project process for planning, executing, and deploying new systems and technology capabilities.

Using a methodology is important to ensure that application systems are developed and deployed on schedule and within budget, satisfy business requirements, and meet established quality standards.

A project methodology defines the project process, roles, and deliverables.

People Performance Management: Identify, nurture, and evolve the skills and human resources (both technology and business) required to provide quality technology services.

Why is this important to you as a businessperson? Having people with the right skills, experience, and knowledge is a primary determinant of successful technology projects and service outcomes.

People planning and training processes must be established and periodically reviewed by both technology and business leaders.

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  This ensures the appropriate technology and business people skills base to support current and planned projects and services.
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  This is all the more critical given continual industry, technology, organizational changes, and changes in both business and technology requirements over time.

Real-time performance reviews must include goals for improving technology – business engagement, and project delivery. These goals need to be consistent and aligned between business and technology resources.