I am taking the headline from a newspaper article in the Tuesday 10th February 2009 edition of the Australian Financial Review. I couldn’t have said it better. It is an article by Fiona Balfour, former CIO of Qantas and Telstra, on how to best manage IT projects and applications in tough times when budgets are under scrutiny. It is paid subscription to the newspaper, so I will paraphrase the article. Fiona says that in addition to being budget conscious, IT leaders must also preserve capability and organisational competitive agility and it requires a focussed plan. She highlights 3 typical types of IT investment projects:
- Major Strategic that are generally multi-year and they deliver significant competitive and /or operational advantage to the organisation. These projects are formally managed and are focussed on a combination of a variety of benefits – cost savings, cost reductions or cost avoidance and revenue growth as well as some competitive elements – such as improving customer service. They might also serve to reduce operational or regulatory risk.
- Non-strategic projects that add or evolve functionality of existing investments.
- Then, finally, application maintenance that includes “break/fix”, upgrades, preventative maintenance and minor enhancements.
The responsibility of IT managers to provide solutions that will preserve capability with fewer employees serving the same number of customers as well as remain flexible in changing market conditions requires those managers to consider the processes that drive their businesses. Business Process and Performance Management (BPPM) links the operational enterprise workflow capabilities of products like FlowCentric to strategic performance management requirements to steer businesses through these though times.
BPPM projects should typically be high priority initiatives in times like this as it supports all the major objectives set by Fiona as major strategic projects. BPPM projects define the required process performance measures upfront and then set out to achieve those through enterprise workflow automation and constant process monitoring. It optimises the use of scarce people resources and reduces process lag time in email inboxes waiting for actions. It notifies and escalates tasks and informs managers when service levels to customers are not met. It actively manages business processes on autopilot with the necessary feedback systems to those in charge.
It is really the only way I can see how organisations can preserve capability, remain agile and work within organisational and regulatory requirements.
Interestingly enough, the same newspaper has an interview with Mr. Barry Simpson, CIO for Coca Cola Amatil in Australia, and he suggested that they are looking to accelerate some of their IT projects that give them strategic advantage in an attempt to turn up the heat on competitors. “When business is though, and the economy is though, that’s when strong companies get stronger. This is when you want to be investing in business to drive that growth and to take advantage of weakened competitors”.
Definitely a strategy that could also benefit from BPPM.
Filed under: Performance Management
