Information technology is the new kid on the block as compared to many of the familiar parts of an organisations structure. HR, Finance have benefited from not only been around a lot longer but by having a wealth of theories and best practices such as “Maslow's hierarchy of needs" and standards to draw upon.
This is not the case with IT and the results can be seen within many organisations that believe IT is something best left to the techies off in their isolated acronym laded world. Many organisations believe that there is little if no need for board representation for IT, choosing to ignore it strategically and just assign significance to it only as an operational cost centre.
IT should be represented at board level by an executive that not only understands technology but can be proactive in mapping business strategy to technology to a long term vision. They should be seen a person that can drive innovation within the business not shackled by operational constraints.
Recently, there has been a revitalised push towards driving business forward with strategic approaches, few people in business would question why the need for business strategy. After all why should they, if you don’t know where you’re trying to get to how are you going to plan to get there? So why is technology so significant?
Let me give you an example, a strategic business objective could be to “create a consistent customer service for our clients” or “increase staff engagement with the organisation”, how then could these be delivered? The creation of a Client Relationship Management solution to deliver a consistent approach to clients throughout the organisation and the creation of a staff intranet portal to publish values, objective, information, news, blogs etc could be a way of engaging and motivating staff to action.
Like it or not as these examples show many of our strategic objectives are tied to technology, as in this day and age technology have become the delivery mechanism of choice to many of our objectives and a strategic enabler for our organisations, even to the point that technology itself can be utilised to drive business forward (take the internet as an example).
A tried and tested analogy within the software industry is the house building scenario and the stages therein, requirement gathering, drawing up the plans, starting the build etc. As compare enterprise architecture is more akin to city planning you look at the infrastructure between your commercial, residential and industrial areas, decide where the roads should go and where the electricity should be laid, where the houses should be placed.
You should plan a long term strategic view that is lead by the strategy of you business (3-5 yrs) which should be continually review along with you business strategy. Tactical projects should be delivered within the plan and feed directly into your strategic goals. Realise that the one system that everyone wants is an ideal and plan to create a platform for integration to allow you software assets to work together.
Find out where you are within the spectrum of organisation in your own industry. Larger IT vendors now have defined maturity models you can use. Microsoft have a model called “Infrastructure Optimisation” which allows you to assess everything from your hardware networked assets all the way up to your individual software application to identify how your using IT within your organisation. This is scored against “cost centre” (business sees it as a cost centre) to “dynamic” (business perceives you as a strategic enabler). You can use tools like this to gauge where you are to learn how you should rationalise and how much you could save going forward.
Work with your business to clarify the business strategy and identify the role of IT in achieving it. Monitors spend and the value received from technology projects to build a history of knowledge to basis decisions on within your organisations. Assign accountability for new IT capabilities to your business not to IT as they need to drive it, if no one is accountable the project will most likely fail. Share and reuse lessons learn from each implementation to build up a best practise procedures when running IT projects.
This may all sound expensive but just think about it planning to a long term visions allows you to build to a plan not be lead down the tactical project scenario which breeds chaos and inevitably creates systems that communicates with nothing but themselves. Planning long term and delivering solutions that are connected via a software backbone has not only cost benefits but promotes greater quality and reduces risk to the organisation considerably.