Every department within any adaptive corporation needs to be held responsible for raising the "BAR". Budget, Accountability and Results.

With more and more pressure on IT Departments to do more with less; those who embrace automation where possible as part of an overall plan tend to succeed. Those who fail to plan and fall back on increasing head count or outsourcing to patch a leak can only hope to obtain mediocre results at best. In today's business world status quo or just getting by gets you fired. Adding value to your firm through increased operational efficiencies, improved asset utilization and the timely deployment of new technologies and business processes gets you promoted.

Like it or not IT now finds itself aligned with the pressures of today's corporate expectations like everyone else.

James Gingerich
Sr Partner Account Manager
Sybase iAnywhere Solutions
jgingeri@ianywhere.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesg2006
http://softwareindustryrant.blogspot.com/

My primary objective as a technology executive is to continuously improve upon the financial performance business by leveraging technology to tactically execute the corporate strategy.

This cannot be accomplished without running IT as a business. If a measurable return for a project or initiative does not exist, it should get bumped to the bottom of the priority list. Basic fiscal management is a great way to monitor the value of IT to the business overall, and even down to the project-level.

If the result of Project: ABC is a 20% increase in production efficiency, then we can handle the same production volume with less people. Snapshot that figure and add it to your IT “income line”. This also enables the IT executive to come full-circle on those numbers and ensure the new efficiency was departmentally executed.

Following the successful implementation of Project: ABC, there should be either a 20% reduction in production labor expenditure or a 20% increase in production volume without any labor increase.

This is where the IT executive is most valuable to the corporate strategy; by focusing on continuous financial performance and leveraging technology to tactically execute. If done properly, it is why so many IT executives are primed for a bigger role.

Ray Buchner
raybuchner[-at]hotmail.com
www.linkedin.com/in/raybuchner

We have to be clear about what is the aim of the IT department - if it is looking to make a profit from its customers, then it needs to be run like a business. However, in the vast majority of organisations this is not the case and its services are not sold through to end customers, but instead IT is just an integral component in the running of the organisation. It is therefore not like a business, but is part of one.

The fact that so much discussion goes on around how to "align" or "converge" IT with the business just goes to show how there is still misunderstanding of how it fits within a business. This then drives the desire to want to explain it in terms the business understands - in the case of this article, the focus is on the topic that "IT is like a business".

IT is just like any other department and uses people, processes and technology to fulfill its role within the organisation and like any other department, needs to be able to justify its cost-benefit, including business cases for incremental investments.

This shouldn't be seen as under-estimating the value that IT can bring to the business, as it can be the source of incremental revenue opportunities, margin improvement and competitive advantage. But while the perception is perpetuated of IT as being some sort of alien within the business, it will always be necessary to try and explain - even justify - its existence in terms the business understands.

A resolution to this problem would be to have a hierarchy of business acumen in the people within IT, so that from the CIO all the way down to the technician, they are able to understand and articulate how their work contributes towards the success of the business. This would extend to supplimenting technical training with business studies to facilitate a longer term approach to normalising IT's role in the business than can be achieved through metaphors.

I'll finish by illustrating this circumstance with a question - when was the last time that the Accounts, Personnel or Marketing departments had to be explained to the business as being "like a business" with the organisation?

Finally! Thank you, Chris for a word of sanity and common sense in this sea of “IT is a business within a business”.

Should we in IT learn more about the business? Of course. Should we start behaving more like business people rather than bunch of overindulged kids? Absolutely. But should we run IT like a business? Talk to any specialist in economics analysis (not accountants). They will tell you that it doesn’t make much sense except a few very special cases...

Truly,
Eugene Nizker