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March 2, 2006
Optimizing IT for Business
Business always enjoys the ability to directly engage IT resources as a response to business needs and robust technology markets. The business can directly drive the sourcing and provision of IT into its operations.
But the consequences of that engagement extend far beyond functionality and expense, into the broader ecologies and economics of the organization's health and growth, affecting business value and business risk.
Designing the business reliance on IT as a strategic outcome of resource management requires logically managing the investment of IT assets into models of service governed by accountability standards for business relationships and business performance.
Inserting management into the Business-IT engagement, IT operations create effectiveness on the basis of service capabilities that balance for the business demand and supply (of IT) over designated periods of time within the boundaries of funding levels.
- Catalogs and Contracts prescribe demand.
- Portfolio and Lifecycle management prescribes supply.
Between the value propositions associated with demand (justifications) and with supply (options), standards for practices in sourcing (buy/build) and provision (deploy/support) create more predictable and secured scenarios for balancing costs, risks and quality -- in both the availability of IT enablement for business functions, and likewise in the capacity.
The logical linkage of Services, as established by architecture and agreements, provides a basis for continuous measurement and improvement of the alignment mechanism established between IT impacts and business operations. This rationalizes resource allocations and optimizes the IT enablements of the business.
As a critical mediating influence on the business leveraging of IT, management brought by the IT organization (gray boxes above) sees to it that the business builds it expectations with proven alternatives.
Supporting the business visibility of the alternatives, and controlling the development and delivery of the alternatives, become logically collaborative strategic efforts between the IT and Business organizations.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at March 2, 2006 3:48 PM
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