How a decision-maker views technology, quite often, determines its effectiveness in providing measurable improvements to the business. If you are enamored with technical bells and whistles, or view IT as a necessary evil, you will fall into traps that will ensure minimal returns if not losses from your IT investments.
Alternatively, if you take the dual approach of matching technology after developing your best-practices business processes, or requiring technology solutions to show how they support a new best-practice, you will have identified critical data to be collected allowing you to model and track the actual performance impact of your investment. It all starts with the process supporting a business strategy.
From the vantage point of understanding your business’ optimal processes you can then ask a set of questions and gather data to determine the usefulness of the technology you are considering:
- Does this investment help me to increase revenue or lower costs?
- Does the investment help me to make better business decisions through accurate and actionable data?
- Does the investment improve or maintain my alignment with the business strategy and key processes?
- Does the investment have suitable Return on Investment (ROI) or reduce my Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of necessary IT assets?
- Is this solution scalable; what is it’s realistic lifecycle?
