Business-IT Strategy
Does your organization have a “technology fat” disease?
As IT has become an integral part of every department, the demand on IT services from the organization has increased exponentially. This means more IT resources, more systems to be brought to the organization , more vendors to be managed and many more minor and major changes and maintenance work is required to fulfill the business demand. Moreover, IT is asked to lead and transform the business into the digital world by bringing in more advanced technologies. All of this over a period of time, leaves the organization with a pile of platforms, systems and applications to operate. Some symptoms of this “technology fat” disease are:
The number of applications used by customers service representatives to answer and fulfill customer requests.
The number of applications used by back office staff to complete their processes.
The different types of application, database & integration technologies and the number of vendors the organization has.
The struggle of budgeting and project prioritization between various business units, compliance, risk, security and IT.
The lack of IT human resources and in-house development vs. the expenses of system changes by the vendors.
The difficulty of producing accurate and uniformed data reporting for high-level management from many platforms and systems.
The duplicated systems and work that eventually achieve or can achieve the same goal.
In this case, the organization’s leadership should setup and re-align the business-IT strategy. They should decide on how much focus should be given on “run the business” vs. “change the business” based on the objectives of the organization. Tough questions are to be asked and strategic decisions are to be made on what to keep and what to let go. Continuous meetings are to be conducted between the units and cross-functional teams to be formed to have a common understanding and get align around the overall strategic objectives.
We in Experts Domain can help diagnosing the current state and assisting in every step of building and aligning your business-IT strategy.