Few strategic IT improvements require large amounts of investment – instead changing the current way of working or investing differently can be where the biggest gains come from.
Imagine your IT organisation won the lottery. How would you spend its winnings to improve its services? Almost immediately, everyone will think of lots of things they improve, some things they need to replace and a few new things that would be useful. A significant planning assumption can often be that organisations can benefit more from changing the way they use or make their existing investments rather than deploying new capabilities using new sources of cash.
Most IT organisations aren’t missing something you can buy
The most important missing piece for most IT organisations is often strategic direction, time, or processes. Staff usually know how to do almost anything they’re asked to do, they just don’t know why, when and where. If they do, they often don’t have the time to do it at a pace they’re comfortable with.
Without wanting to solve the IT world’s issues in sentence, it often becomes easy to suggest that regular communication from leaders, better time management and defined processes can bring the biggest improvements for the individuals who keep IT running. While effort and expense might be needed to implement some time management and improve operational processes, hopefully there’ll still be a lot of change from the £1m in the winnings pot. The biggest improvements often don’t require the biggest investments.
Changing the way existing investments are made
Where IT is already spending money, care should be taken to ensure it’s invested as strategically as possible. A very current consideration should be how cloud services will affect the future of IT operations and therefore the investment in them. For example, now probably isn’t the time to be buying large amounts of software licensing if there isn’t cloud use rights bundled in. When a portion of that £1m is spent, organisations should be making sure now more than even that their spending plans are aligned to their vendors product roadmaps. Similarly, organisations should make sure upgrade rights are also included. It could be very easy to use big portions of the £1m winnings to upgrade dangerously old systems that never had regular upgrade cycles.
Improving the quality of investments
If the cost of internal developers ate into the £1m pot then organisations are likely to ask the buy vs. build question more often. When new capabilities are needed, some organisations build them internally by default whereas others will always buy them from a vendor. Even for those with an internal development capability, buying a solution from a vendor can often be the right approach. As IT organisations become more strategic, their focus should be on developing what makes them unique internally rather than platforms of generic capabilities.
The value a portion of the £1m pot gives is likely to be higher when specialist vendors and staff are used for generic capabilities or one-off projects, even if the cost is higher.
This article has covered many different topics, most for no more than two or three sentences . However, its intention is to highlight how money often isn’t the biggest barrier to improving IT operations. Instead communication, process and buying decisions are now often having a bigger impact.