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Subject: IT Decision-Making
Tutorial: The IT Investment Management Approach ("Approach")
What Does The IT Investment Management Approach Do To Help?
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Subject: IT Decision-Making
Tutorial: The IT Investment Management Approach ("Approach")
3. Standardizes Information Requirements
A common difficulty facing IT organizations is that they receive little or no useful guidance about what senior management wants during the Selection phase, and even less during the Control (a.k.a., implementation) phase. What the CIO does know is that whatever he/she provides is rarely good enough.
Conversely, senior management can’t understand why the IT organization doesn’t give them the information they need in a language they can understand.
One of the key benefits of the Approach is to introduce standardization to the communication process between technical and non-technical management. Although, it places a greater responsibility on the IT organization to communicate in business terms, the emphasis is to make it easier to do so.
For example, the information includes for each IT project / activity:
- Strategic goal / business objective supported (Do I need it?)
- Priority (How much do I want it?)
- Benefits and results stated in business, not technical, terms (What will it do for me?)
- Complete cost (What does it cost?)
- Key performance indicators, and milestones (for projects) (When will I get it?)
- Risk assessment (What might go wrong?)
Senior management can then more readily, and reliably, answer the questions: Can we afford it?; Do we want to afford it?; Should we spend our money elsewhere?
Go to the next page for illustrations of how the Approach works.
IT Investment Management Approach, Lesson 8 of 21
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