Using Technology to Drive Business Improvement

Maximizing Your IT Investment
Technology will foster productivity… if meshed well with business processes

IT improvements are essential to achieving profitable growth. To make them pay off, a company needs to focus on more than just technology—the improvement has to be felt in the business results. And this means joining IT closely with End-User business processes. This prerequisite is essential to an organizations' ability to:

• Enhance operating efficiency
• Streamline business processes
• Improve consumer interfaces and services
• Assess data risks
• Maximize intellectual capital

Common IT Challenges

Certain IT-User challenges seem to be recurring in nature. Examples of some of the more pressing confrontations and elements used by PPI in helping clients increase their ROI on IT include:

Prioritizing IT Projects - Maximizing limited resources

• Develop an effective methodology for prioritizing IT projects
• Produce an IT framework or "blueprint"
• Develop formal process steps, timelines and SLAs for the prioritization process
• Navigate politics and sensitivities when prioritizing limited IT resources

Aligning IT with Operations - Business changes constantly tax IT-user alignment

• Assess current processes for meshing user requirements with IT resource allocations
• Mesh alignment processes with IT Governance and strategic practices
• Develop protocols to implement improved processes
• Produce Alignment metrics to help enforce new practices

Monitoring and controlling IT implementations and activities - End-users need to be engaged but not dominating

• Analyze gaps in the current IT governance methodology
• Determine decision-making protocols
• Develop Measure and Control Plans to increase accountability & ROI

Instituting Service Level Agreements - Silo compliance isn’t adequate

• Gather critical User and IT requirements
• Formalize dependencies, commitments and processes for developing the SLAs
• Institute practical processes to engage interdepartmental compliance
• Develop meaningful metrics to measure compliance & effectiveness

Additional Barriers to Successfully leveraging IT Investments

IT maturity, speed, constant change and performance management

• Comparing & contrasting user and customer IT requests
• Identifying gaps with IT Acquisition Integration
• Enhancing information visibility
• Implementing activity-based performance metrics
• Assessing data silos that service individual corporate functions