One of the most important roles for a leader of an organisational unit is to negotiate with stakeholders the axes of goodness for the value delivered by the unit. This can take the form of a Value Proposition. This is partly about agreeing the basis of distributing any rewards for good performance but also about being clear about expectations and what the rest of the organisation needs from this particular competency area.
My experience working with IT[1] organisations is that aspects of that value proposition can be split into 4 dimensions. These form a useful checklist of things an organisation might consider.
Money
There is usually some statement about money. This may relate to keeping cost of IT low, or investing in IT to make cost of business low, or investing in IT to increase business value.
It may be framed in terms of trends over time (for example flat funding), comparison with others (eg between given percentiles of a comparison with peers of IT Spend as a % of revenue).
It may be framed in terms of total spend or unit costs.
It may be focussed on in year spending, or a 3 or 5 year period.
It may focus primarily on OpEx or CapEx.
Service
Usually the primary role is to provide IT services but this is often more or less “assumed” and doesn’t get specified. Even if service is good (and hence not a focus of attention) it is still necessary to specify, as otherwise if cost pressures come there is no rational basis for determining if a particular aspect of service needs to be kept at current levels.
At a basic level, organisations can measure availability. The measurement should be of services {as perceived and consumed by people) , not of technology components. Where services are available to customers and ecosystem partners, these also need to be measured.
Other considerations may include data quality, degree of Straight-Through-Processing[2]
Change
Requirements change and it is important that an IT organisation handles this “well”.
The ease of making change could be expressed in terms of Applications Development productivity, Time to Market (for particular classes of change)
Predictability of change might be in terms of % of project delivered on time, in full and to quality and budget. Some organisations are relatively tolerant of cost and what the time taken will be but require absolute success in delivering to whatever is agreed (particularly if the IT component is a part of a major capital project such as a new railway route or an aircraft carrier).
Others may be more interested in minimising the disruption and chaos from changes. This might include being able to plan projects to avoid risk of disruption in peak periods.
Duty of Care
This is perhaps the most abstract. For money, service and change the rest of the organisation will know that it needs and wants them. But IT also has a duty of care to deliver value that may be less obvious to the organisation. Negotiating this – building and understanding and appreciation of and appetite for, this kind of value is important for business executives (and also simplifies securing necessary investments when the time comes).
So what kind of things are included under this heading? Basically any necessary investment where there is no immediate obvious benefit to the business performance (but if not made will risk business damage). Examples include:
- Information Security, Cyber Security
- Business Continuity
- Disaster recovery
- Protection from future obsolescence (continuous upgrades or “evergreening”)
- Managing levels of technical debt
- Ensuring compliance (software licensing, GDPR, etc)
Note that “Value for Money” doesn’t count here as a proposition. The whole proposition is the definition of value and the “for money” aspect is the first dimension. Value for Money is the emergent result, not a component statement.
[1] For the purposes of this discussion, I consider IT, IS, Digital Technology etc etc to be synonymous. There can be huge variety in roles between such organisations but there is little consistently of labelling, so I will just stick to “IT” as a broad catch-all.
[2] Where transactions are completed by an organization without need for human intervention