Functional Strategy Business Model Innovation Organizational Architecture
IT Strategy and Governance
IT Cost Optimization
Organizational Reinvigoration
IT Strategy and Governance
Today, information technology enables virtually every function within the enterprise, and technology expenditures are now the single largest capital expense for many major corporations. As a result, the ability of IT to deliver business value is more important than ever.
Yet despite its growing importance, in most companies IT as a functional group has not left the “back office:” it is neither organized nor governed to most effectively implement or, as important, contribute to business strategy. Senior business and IT leaders often struggle to:
Deliver new IT-enabled business capabilities;
Invent and deploy new business models, especially those which require changes in IT;
Migrate to new IT infrastructure and architecture, or integrate acquisitions;
Improve IT performance and cost-effectiveness;
Transform IT organizations to make them more agile and responsive.
Moreover, two complementary trends are combining to challenge long-standing practices in organizing and operating enterprises in general:
The world is getting “flatter“ (globalizing), bringing more contenders into direct competition for customers and markets; and,
Enterprises and industries are investing in the activities where they believe they add the most value, and outsourcing the rest.
Both of these developments are powered by information technology (IT).
So IT matters more than ever, yet IT itself is still largely governed "the old way"—seen as either a back-office function of little strategic consequence, or (occasionally) as a panacea, conjuring new business capabilities to render the competition irrelevant. In neither case is IT fully integrated into the ongoing crafting and execution of business strategy.
As IT organizations fragment in order to cope with market and business demands, it becomes more difficult to effectively manage and coordinate IT across the extended enterprise — and especially difficult for business and IT managers to move together to set and execute strategy.
When IT was "centralized," it could be managed and controlled with the usual mechanisms: SOPs, pyramid reporting, trickle-down budgeting to enforce priorities, etc. With today's increasingly distributed, outsourced and offshored IT organizations, however, the old ways often don't suffice. Even within the core alone, as IT's role expands these mechanisms are challenged by the sheer volume of work to be directed — one reason why PPM, management dashboards, and resource management tools have become so popular. These tools help, but they are not sufficient to govern IT capabilities and assets spread across multiple organizations, and keep them aligned with business and operating strategy.
Our practice in IT Strategy and Governance helps IT and business leaders identify, make, and execute key choices about how IT is governed and operated in support of business objectives. We help our clients:
Design, establish, and/or improve the effectiveness of governance mechanisms such as architecture review boards, technology councils, etc., and extend their coordination across business units and to outsourcing partners. Many "best practice frameworks" recommend such bodies, but they are usually ineffective if not properly customized to the particular organizational and strategic context in which they operate.
Develop and deploy actionable enterprise architecture (EA) — so that it guides day-to-day decisions in projects, procurement, business units and outsourcing partners, instead of remaining an unrealized vision.
Prioritize IT investments, projects and activities — such that IT priorities are consistent with the needs of the business strategy, the EA and the technology strategy; and that priorities are integrated with budgeting and resource allocation and that the portfolio of risks are managed.
Track and reward the performance of processes, units and individuals—such that management processes are improved, decision quality raised, and appropriate behaviors rewarded.
