IT Effectiveness

There isn't a CIO in the country who isn't told every day that he (or she) should be doing more with less.

Great. But how do you do that? Even though IT is increasingly important and gets an increasing share of the budget, it is extremely difficult to tie IT expenditure directly to results, especially bottom line results.

But then how do you justify the expenditure? Is an upgrade to Windows just a cost of doing business? Is the cost of your network something best assessed by pointing to industry benchmarks (which probably don't exist). Should you buy a new Sarbanes package? There are no really good answers.

At B2B Analysts, Inc., we are frequently approached by CIOs who would like to determine the effectiveness of a particular application (either a planned purchase or a current implementation) or of their entire IT organization.

Let's say right off: we don't have any canned answers. We don't say, "Do a business case," or "Set service levels," or "Activity-based assessments are the way to go." Our approach is individual; we try to look at what your company wants from IT and ways we can improve both the perception and the actuality.

What we bring instead is a good deal of experience with both technology and process. Because we know technologies, we can tell if there are capabilities you can exploit. Because we know change management and process improvement, we can tell you how to improve the fit between your processes and your technology.

We have done work on improving IT effectiveness in all of the following areas:

• Project audits. We work with the internal steering committee to help keep a project on track, while still being responsive to changing business conditions.
• Software selection. We help you decide which software to choose, and we help you justify that decision by setting up a business case and a plan for tracking the results of the implementation.
• Business process development. When systems go in, processes need to change. Have they changed appropriately? Are you working at optimal efficiency, given what you have? We work with business groups and with IT on evaluating and redesigning the fit between processes and systems.
• Organizational effectiveness. Is the IT group as a whole succeeding in its mission? Or is a newly enabled business group meeting its new charges? Most people try hard and work hard, but sometimes their efforts go for naught. We understand the complexity of the problem, but we also know that some relatively simple approaches can provide remarkable results.

If you are interested in talking more to us about work in IT effectiveness, please contact us.