* IT leaders need to demonstrate their value to the enterprise
IT leaders must do more to demonstrate value to the overall business, according to Gartner analysts who spoke at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in San Francisco last week.
“The next three years will place an extraordinary amount of pressure on IT organizations challenged to continually show members of the entire enterprise that they deliver value sufficient to warrant remaining an intact organization,” said Kenneth McGee, vice president and a Gartner fellow. “To do this, IT executives must do more than just cut costs. They must deliver value that is measurable and of significant importance to the enterprise.”
To do this, McGee recommends conquering these initiatives within three years:
* Establish a track record of creating value. You need to be able to create business value faster than the market and technology can reduce IT and business costs.
* Automate IT operational processes. Configuration management vendors are creating tools that provide rigorous change management and audit capabilities.
* Attain “corrective phase” security status. Once you have a consistent security strategy, you can revamp security and risk governance practices and structures and evolve a strategic information security architecture.
* Create a business intelligence competency center. A BICC consists of people from the business areas as well as IT gurus who work to integrate business intelligence and performance management initiatives.
* Adopt a multisourcing discipline. Companies must move towards a new era of value chains to serve clients and operate businesses.
* Operate all revenue-generating channels in a Web 2.0 architecture. Have IT architects coordinate complexity through unified business and IT strategy.
* Establish cross-project, enterprise-level application management. Focus on continuous improvement through resource changes, methodology changes and changes in architecture that enable higher composition, reuse and integration.
* Retire 10% of your applications. Reduce complexity by ditching applications that provide little or no functional business value.
* Reinsert people into all customer-facing business processes. A likely area of business process change is to significantly alter customer care processes that are heavily dependent on self-service solutions and to increase degrees of human interaction.
