During the past few years, there has been much debate about how to define business success and where business leaders should invest their resources to get the best possible outcomes. As a part of this discussion, industry experts and luminaries have debated the value of IT, its role in the organization, and whether technology should be treated as a strategic asset or relegated to a utility function of the business.
As we listen to our customers and partners, one thing has become clear. Spending large amounts of money to simply build IT infrastructure or address a single business issue does not meet the overall objectives of the company. IT must be tied to business performance and it must be treated as an asset with specific Return on Investment (ROI) or Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) metrics.
Every few years the industry reaches an inflection point. The last inflection point came with the end of the dot-com era, when business bet big on technology in two ways. First, massive investments infrastructure and silo’d applications (like CRM) led to disappointment when those investments did not live up to there promise. Second, business spent against the idea of moving customer experiences to the web.
But very few of these technologies were connected together. The data existed but was not accessible. Applications solved specific problems, but created new ones when the information couldn’t be ported to related business functions and processes. And the load on infrastructure increased with systems and technology that wasn’t connected and integrated.
All of this created an opportunity for the industry. We rose to the occasion by developing new ways to interoperate with each another. With the introduction of technology like Web services we are now able to break down the barriers and take advantage of all the investments in technology that were spent in previous years and decades.
So, it’s a new day for business and technology. IT has become a strategic asset to the business to drive new value to employees, managers and teams. But we now invest in technology in a different way because technology does not drive a business – people do. IT infrastructure is not capable of making decisions – people do.
Therefore, the only way a business can optimize its investments in technology is to optimize for the people who use the technology.
Therefore, a people-ready business is one who empowers their people to deliver business results.
To learn more, check out this 8 minute Radio interview - www.msreadiness.com/talkradio