Your IT Governance Coach

Aligning to your company's growth strategy

Some functional executives like CIOs have difficulty aligning their function's strategy to the corporation's because sometimes corporate strategies are not clearly communicated beyond the publishing of mission and vision statements. I have had clients say, "we can't develop our strategy until the corporation clarifies theirs." Regardless of what is published or not published, a company's real strategy is indicated by the actual trade-offs that are made, how people and divisions are rewarded, and how priorities are set. CIOs and their staff can develop a set of assumptions about the drivers they need to respond to and engage their business partners in confirming and articulating those drivers.

Many companies are right now focused on growth. In fact, a recent ComputerWorld article states that "Around 60% of CIOs expect their businesses to grow faster than the global economy, which the IMF predicts will grow at around 5% a year until 2012." However, companies use various strategies to grow their company. IT executives can use Gartner' s Seven Levers for Growth model to develop assumptions about their company's growth strategy and engage their business partners in dialog. They can then modify their strategy to ensure they are enabling and exploiting such opportunities.

The model mentions these seven levers for growth:

• Improve operations
• Improve products
• Exploit channels
• Target customers and markets
• Acquire companies
• Connect the ecosystem
• Create blue oceans

Effective IT governance ensures all decisions advance and support the IT and corporate strategies.

Technorati Tags: IT Strategy

Study Reveals Positive Impact of Training in Mitigating IT Risks

Study Reveals Positive Impact of Training in Mitigating IT Risks
Government Technology (06/20/07)

IT teams that are well trained are better able to leverage key technology features and functions, resulting in an increase of performance and productivity, concludes a new study by IDC and Symantec. The study focused on more than 200 North American functional IT teams consisting of two to three staff members. High-performing teams spent an average of 78.9 hours on maintaining and improving operations per month--considered high value activities--compared to 62.8 hours for low-performing IT organizations. In addition, high-performing IT organizations spent less time on low-value activities--they spent an average of 49.2 hours per month deploying solutions and 62.9 hours per month resolving broken tools or processes, while low-performing teams spent 54.7 hours on average deploying solutions and 73.5 hours resolving broken tools and processes per month. Because the well-trained teams used their time more efficiently, they could potentially realize a 10 percent increase in productivity, representing savings of up to 2,000 hours or $70,000 in gained productivity annually. The benefit of training not only lies in enhancing skills and performance, but also on reducing IT risks such as compliance. The study found that well-trained IT staff met software configuration standards for their production servers more than twice as often compared to less-trained teams.

Technorati Tags: IT Risk Management