360°IT Blog

Too often, IT departments are told to make greater savings, do more with less or put projects on the back boiler as the business tries to balance the books while still leaving money for what is sees as more important business investments.

But hang on - isn't IT a business investment? If an organisation sees it as something separate, only there as a 'nice to have', it deserves everything that happens to it. Moreover, any IT department that has allowed this situation to develop should hang its head in shame - it has effectively managed to divorce itself from the business and is essentially viewed as an external provider. And, as we all know, when times are bad it's external providers that get squeezed.

But, for any organisation to manage its way through a recession and be ready for the good times again, certain investments must continue through the bad times. Firms just have to manage these investments more effectively and ensure they get the best bang per buck from any project given the go ahead.

This is where I see many IT departments suffering. They may recognise that some new technology or architecture could be of use - but they don't know how best to get this across to the business. After all, they are getting little help from the vendor community, who still spout a mix of technology gobbledygook ("The new X-B200T runs at 3.6GHz, supports 1Pb of in-line memory and manages 2 Bronto-FLOPS!") and marketing non-speak ("The X-B200T offers the lowest TCO of any item on the market, and has an average ROI of under 7 minutes...").

Such messages are less than compelling to the business - particularly if the main benefit is that life will be easier for the IT function because of better management systems, modelling or whatever. These areas can still have a positive impact on the wider business - but benefits need to be teased out and communicated in the best possible manner.

Any change should only go ahead if it has an overall positive impact on the business - not just on a particular individual or group. Of course, the domino effect can mean a change affecting one group also has a significant impact on the overall business - but we shouldn't confuse the two. Any arguments for changes to the IT platform should be couched in terms that make sense to the business as a whole.

It is certainly possible to create a business case rapidly and effectively, but you need to look at what Quocirca calls the Total Value Proposition (TVP). Any change in an organisation will be aimed at lowering cost, lowering risk and/or increasing value to the business. Cost and risk are the easy ones to understand, but how about 'value'? Value can be more ephemeral, yet it should ultimately lead to one of two things: selling more of the same (at the same or greater margin), or selling something new at an adequate margin.

If a proposed change in the business can be shown to move these value/risk/cost variables in the right direction, it becomes far easier to get the go-ahead for any investment. You can download a paper here which uses data centre infrastructure management as an example of how a business case can be built up in this way.

Through the use of such an approach, IT can not only gain the ability to run more projects but can also be seen by the business as being central to core decision-making and business change. All it needs is the capability to talk more of the business's language - and to present any change in the terms that the business understands.

Clive Longbottom is founder and service director of industry analyst Quocirca

Tags: business benefits, IT investment case, assessing value of IT, ROI, communicating business beneifts

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