Business Value Of IT

The Hegemony of Large Numbers – Ignoring Common Sense

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ February 28, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Ok, maybe I’m stretching the meaning there, but that’s a cool sounding title, and what I see as an interesting phenomenon. People get excited about Large Numbers, and think they have meaning and importance simply because they are Large Numbers. Big Errors For example – years ago, when an application manager was whirling around the [...]

Chargebacks vs. Allocations – Defining IT’s Relationship with the Business

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 16, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Some IT departments prefer chargebacks, while others do not. My own preference is to allocate IT costs to the business units, based on some reasonable balance of simplicity and accuracy. General services could be allocated by headcount, COGs, or revenues, with each business unit taking their proportional share. Some easily identifiable items might be allocated [...]

Defining Business Benefits: Hard and Soft

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 6, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

All projects should have a clear objective, a practical plan, and an understanding of the costs and benefits to get the thing done. Easy to say, but a lot of project teams struggle to crisply and clearly define specific business benefits. One way to move the process forward would be to have a clear understanding [...]

Calculating the Business Benefit of Effective Training Material (4 of 4)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 20, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

In previous notes, I’ve written about the importance of training and, by extension, effective training material. It’s a common requirement in many organizations … … well, actually more of a “nice to have”, am I right? Truly effective training material is difficult to create (at least, to create material that does the job), and difficult [...]

Business Proposals and The Lesson of Jabberwocky

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 28, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

When someone asks my opinion on their writing, I’ll get fairly detailed; I’ve noted in the past that there is a lot of power and influence in the written word, and it’s fairly important to get it done well, or your project proposals just never seem to get off the ground. This particular proposal suffered from [...]

If I Told You a Fractal Solution, Could You Change the CEO’s Mind?

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ December 6, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

As the new year approaches, debates over the “value” of IT and business projects intensify; it’s not holiday stress, but the excitement of the approaching New [fiscal] Year. Lately, I’m hearing more about the struggle to quantify business value, especially when selecting those few projects that will “make the cut”. We will definitely iterate on [...]

Business Benefits of Social Networks Exist, but …

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ April 26, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

When I see / read articles like this, or hear the breathless claims of vendors, pundits, and True Believers, I’ll privately chuckle to myself. All of this stuff – social networking, collaboration, and innovation – are 21st century takes on good old Knowledge Management (KM), circa 1998. Do these sound like presentations from your recent [...]

Five More Realities for Driving Business Value from Technology

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 31, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Dennis McDonald’s recent post listed Ten Realities of Managing and Using Technology to Generate Business Value. I think a few of these items need some elaboration … Implementing a technology based solution without understanding the costs is a big mistake … and most projects only consider TCI – Total Cost of Implementation. This typically includes [...]

Measuring and Reporting IT Value (2 of 2)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ November 21, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

My last post generated some interest, so here’s the rest of the examples. Last time, I wrote about the simplistic approach to measure and report on IT value: Is your IT group working on the right things? Are they working on the right things well? Is your IT spend comparable to industry norms? Is your [...]

Measuring and Reporting IT Value (1 of 2)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ November 17, 2007 ⋅ One comment

This started off as a quick response to a question on LinkedIn Answers … but I got on a roll … Here’s a simplistic way to measure and report on IT value: Is your IT group working on the right things? Are they working on the right things well? Is your IT spend comparable to [...]