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Maximizing the value of Business-IT-Management

Independent research found that organizations were most successful with planningIT if it was deployed across the enterprise and incorporated into IT decision making. That way IT investments conformed more tightly to organizational goals. We would like to discuss 5 best practices to maximize the value Business-IT-Management can bring to your organization.

Keep your vision in mind

PlanningIT generates the largest benefits when it helps people make decisions according to their organization’s strategic objectives. Although Nucleus has analyzed successful deployments that were limited in scope to a particular project or business unit within an organization, the more an organization’s IT strategy is enabled by planningIT, the higher the returns will be. This is because the most significant benefits happen when IT strategy creation is followed by governance, enforcement, and the pursuit of elimination of unnecessary expenditures.

Don’t boil the ocean

Companies can achieve significant benefits by deploying planningIT with an incremental, hub-and-spoke approach. Nucleus analyzed several successful deployments in which the application was initially adopted by a central IT department, followed by a rolling deployment around the organization. Central IT departments can typically achieve improvements in the areas of compliance, risk management, or application consolidations. Once value is proven centrally, the case should be made to broaden the application out to lines of business and other operations since the broader the participation is, the more costs will be reduced. A user at one company said, “The first user group was at headquarters and adopted planningIT for governance and compliance. Then we extended the data documentation and the user base to the lines of business so they could take advantage of what we know about the IT landscape.”

Use carrots and sticks

Companies achieve higher benefits if people are rewarded for adopting planningIT and fully documenting their assets within it. The more fully an enterprise is documented within planningIT, the more its benefits, such as synergies between applications and projects, can be achieved. However, since people don’t always conform to documentation requirements, companies should be prepared to exclude from the budgeting process any organization with enterprise assets that are not thoroughly documented in planningIT. A policy like this was a key success factor for the major European financial institution that used planningIT to identify the opportunity to retire redundant booking systems. Other organizations consider projects incomplete until they are fully documented in planningIT. A user at one company said, “We don’t consider a project complete unless it’s fully documented in planningIT. If you don’t document, your cycle time statistics suffer.”

Deploy as broadly as possible

In order to maximize the benefits of rationalizing an IT infrastructure and ensuring that it aligns with business strategy, planningIT should be deployed as broadly as possible. Rationalization of projects and IT assets generates the largest cost savings when an organization has visibility across its entire enterprise. For example, the financial institution that is in the process of consolidating its 30 trade booking systems was able to identify these redundancies only because the vast majority of its lines of businesses were fully documented in planningIT. When it comes to maximizing adoption, champions of planningIT should know their target user base. Business units that are mature or have their own budgets sometimes resist adoption because they think it won’t benefit them. These groups should be identified early on so that change management measures can be put in place. Conversely, business units that are entrepreneurial or underfunded will view adoption as a way to leverage existing assets, and should be pursued as early adopters. Wins for such operations should be advertised so that others see the benefits of being on the planningIT footprint.

Don’t underestimate the strategic benefits

The broadest benefits from planningIT are achieved when it is used to align IT activities with the strategic goals of the organization. Too often, the construction of a company’s enterprise infrastructure is the result of ad hoc decisions, localized requirements, and acquisitions. Unfortunately, this can lead to an operating environment full of silos that does not meet — or may even conflict with — an organization’s strategic goals. Nucleus found that planningIT can be used to prevent such a proliferation of assets or rationalize it if it has already happened. Nucleus found that the largest savings occur when planningIT is used to keep decision makers focused on strategies that reduce costs. This can be accomplished by integrating planningIT with as many decision-making workflows as possible. Proposed projects should be considered only if they are proposed within the application. Decision makers such as investment committee members should rely on planningIT to determine whether proposed projects will add value by closing functionality gaps or complementing existing assets.

We invite you to read more on the results of the study, including a list of major gains that organizations enjoy while deploying planningIT by downloading the report of independent Boston based analyst firm Nucleus Research.

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