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Finding the Business Value in Technology
A recent posting on the planningIT User Group Online Forum noted "Most of the value and purpose of our EAM is to plug into business functions". This was posted in response to a question on how to communicate EAM and planningIT value internally, intimating that this is a subject many in EA struggle with. Indeed, many IT people are challenged in translating their shiny bells and whistles into golden business benefits. How to get from the IT benefit, "the transparency the repository delivers", to “In the past five years, we’ve saved approximately $11 million by avoiding internal development projects that we discovered were unnecessary because of analysis we performed in planningIT”? Granted, it takes some talent in abstract thinking and business understanding to bridge the two semantic worlds for the word "value" but success can mean a boost for an EA initiative in terms of support from the business side of the house.
Looking at planningIT, consider the three mainstays of the product - information, process and people - and the technological underpinnings that - with a closer look - reveal real business benefit. What's the business value delivered in planningIT's information repository? Its comprehensive meta model and easy configurability mean quick adaptability to the implementation environment. Data integration with powerful extraction capabilities delivers the means to populate the repository quickly. These and rich best-practice libraries for metrics, indicators, portfolios and workflows let the task at hand begin at once - transforming the IT landscape for low cost and high agility for faster and more cost-effective delivery of business solutions.
Best practice processes out-of-the-box also deliver quick time to value. Solution approaches and workflow templates for standard challenges as well as a high variety of stakeholder interactions through integrated processes provide a high degree of process efficiency. Further, planningIT's unique time and state tracking for all EA artifacts provides Business the means to sync various projects. With unparalleled ability to project future-state architecture for any time period, align proposed solutions with the business strategy roadmap, and understand the interdependencies of multi-parallel projects over time, Business can time initiatives for the greatest synergistic effect.
It is in the way the planningIT technology platform supports the product's third mainstay - people - that contributes to the sustainability of the agility and efficiency benefits mentioned above. planningIT's "all do some" approach (as opposed to "some do all") ensures that all stakeholders who should be involved in enterprise planning are. planningIT thus becomes the fabric of the enterprise for smart IT investment planning. Configurable roles, contextual visualization, visualization on live data and actionable visualization with drill-down capability renders the planning activity relevant and meaningful for each individual stakeholder.
How much value does planningIT deliver? Without diving into a discussion on goal-setting, measurement and metrics, suffice it to say that the question ultimately needs to be answered by Business. It is the results of the changes implemented through planningIT that define the value. We're looking forward to more postings on the planningIT User Group Online Forum on the value topic from our customers' business and financial executives.
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