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IT Management Slideshow:
Choosing Business Technology: Strategy Matters

By Dennis McCafferty on 2011-06-29


As a tech-department leader, you probably love to discover and deploy great new IT innovations. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In the book, The Power of Convergence: Linking Business Strategies and Technology Decisions to Create Sustainable Success (Amacom/available now), author Faisal Hoque reveals how CIOs and other top tech execs can lead the way for breakthroughs that address business values first and foremost. One outstanding example cited is the iPod, which wasn’t really a groundbreaking tech product, Hoque contends. MP3 players, after all, existed well before Apple introduced the product. What gave the iPod the edge, however, was the creation of the iTunes music store that allowed consumers to buy songs, rather than entire albums, as well as a highly user-friendly experience. Hoque is founder/CEO of BTM Corp., a top business-technology management solutions firm. Here are 10 how-to highlights:

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Don’t feel pressured to rip up the enterprise structure.
Elevating your department’s business impact doesn’t mean discarding and replacing all things IT. It means improving and sharpening what’s already there.

Incorporate marketplace/competitive analysis into all IT activities.
Even for mundane, “routine” tech tasks, the bottom-line purpose must be made clear department-wide.

Get consensus from other departments on desired objective of an IT project.
Is it to spark growth? Maintain or improve infrastructure? Manage risk? A clear picture must form for effective execution.

Understand how baselines for business analysis are obtained.
Historical trends? Industry benchmarks? Peer-group focused research? You need to know how it all got here to make good use of it.

Evaluate differentiators.
Differentiation is what makes a company’s products and services valuable. Pinpoint how IT can enhance positive distinction in the marketplace.

Prioritize business needs.
Identify, confirm and rank opportunity areas and essential stakeholders.

Design a “holistic view” tech plan.
Equipped with a full picture of business strategies, seek to articulate a series of investment proposals and deployments that directly address every single organizational goal of consequence.

Get signoff on metrics before launch.
Measurements of success or failure must be agreed upon with impacted department leaders so that poor performance is quickly recognized and remediated.

Instill business values throughout your IT department.
They must support planning/behaviors to optimize experiences with valued customers, suppliers and vendor partners.

Interview job candidates for their total organizational perspectives.
Can they only talk about IT? Or do they understand your company’s business drivers and how tech can best support them?

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