by: Bsomich
29 Oct 2009
29 Oct 2009
Linking Information Systems to Business Performance.
The lack of understanding of the relationship between process and platform is a key contributor to the extreme spending on information management systems and technology in organizations today. Many managers are quick to adopt a technology to solve their organizational needs without clearly understanding the underlying business process beforehand. It is often seen that these systems are installed and cannot accomodate the current workflow. For example, they can create new processes, but not faciliate existing ones.
What advice can you offer on the alignment of information systems and process to achieve business performance?
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:57 am
As a professional IT architect and designer it pains me the amount of junk previous regimes have left behind. They are generally trying to solve an immediate issue without any thought to the future goals and direction of the company. Now it’s not fully their fault, most strategic business meetings do not generally include an IT representative, so when it come to understanding the strategic direction of the company most IT departments are simply in the dark reacting to the daily obstacles that bump into them. Also, literally a few hours with an objective 3rd party could save a company millions of dollars in unforeseen changes.
First the process should always drive the technology. Any manager blindly purchasing a technology someone recommends without first understanding in detail the process the technology will be interfacing with is obviously the wrong person for the job and should be removed or moved to a location where they can’t do any further harm to the organization strategically.
Secondly most companies generally underestimate the full ROI of even well positioned IT technologies; they understand when they are able to physically reduce staff and/or equipment or are able to add to production volumes on the floor and out the door; however, those few hours or seconds gained in productivity at the individual employee level are generally overlooked. Even a few minutes per employee over a company of thousands of employees could actually result in being the companies largest return and go almost completely unrecognized.