IT as a Catalyst for Optimal Business Outcomes

I've been thinking about how to kick off my initial blog. What does one say to the bold title of "IT as a catalyst for optimal business outcomes?"

It would be easy to write a number of fluffy diatribes about how good things come from better alignment between the business and IT and while this is true, that is not going to be the primary focus of this blog. My goal is to provide specific examples of best practices gleaned from my regular interactions with customers and those who support them. I'll focus on scenarios where they have taken a business-focused objective and done something from an IT perspective that raised the bar on IT value to the business.

Along with customer scenarios, I will also sprinkle this blog with idea-fostering thoughts about how to effectively leverage trends and technologies for better business outcomes.

And, every once in a while, I may just throw something out there designed to get us thinking about our role as IT professionals in promoting broader goals. This first entry is along those lines.....

I spent the better part of today in a session designed to help our sales teams engage in discovery conversations so that they will focus on what their prospects' need rather than what they have to sell. As my mind started to wander, as it inevitably does around 3 pm, I couldn't help but think that this is even more relevant to the situation in IT today.

We are constantly bombarded with messages from vendors, industry groups, blogs and on-line discussions that focus on technology for technology's sake. This morning, for example, I received emails on the adoption trends of cloud computing, SOA's use for integrating legacy systems, the trade-offs between hands-on or hosted security and how to maximize your storage resource investment. Wearing my IT professional hat, I could see how our heads spin. As a vendor, I clearly see the issues with vendor messaging. It makes me want to stand up and yell, "Who cares?"

My thought for the day: IT needs to engage in discovery conversations, just like formal sales professionals, with the business... And, I don't mean low-level requirements for the next version of the "you name it" system. When we are talking to our business counterparts, we need to understand how they are going to be measured and uncover their most strategic goals even if they don't clearly point to a specific IT project.

From these discovery questions come invaluable insights that will provide the business justification for some of the necessary IT investments that have been traditionally hard to justify. For example, if the business is primarily concerned with customer satisfaction, then investing in customer data analytics and multi-channel delivery could become top of the IT project list. However, investing in real user monitoring and service oriented integration could also be critical to improve customer response time at peak load periods or to quickly deliver new product offers to customers by integrating partner offerings or integrating information into new data services.

A second example: If the business is critically concerned with the pace of change coming from external regulations, than this concern will drive the need for application modernization and the technologies that support it. It becomes intractable to make changes quickly when legacy systems are hard wired together. This insight could be a justification point for installing that new process management software or investing in a technology base for service orientation.

My point is this: it's time for IT to take the time and effort to listen to what the business cares about. Through those conversations come the golden nuggets to support the elusive business case for IT infrastructure investments.

Wisdom is the reward for a lifetime of listening ... when you'd have preferred to talk."

-- D.J. Kaufman