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It’s not about cost savings… it’s about value

  • 아티클

The word ‘value’ has too many meanings and sometimes it masks a real problem. 

I had a conversation with a very smart customer recently, where their IT division is going through a transformation to help their business compete.  I asked if their transformation has the purpose of making IT cost less or increase business agility.  Their answer: It’s less about cost and more about value.

To me, an answer like that is vague.  It sounds good, but what kind of value is IT supposed to deliver? 

And that is the core question we should always ask of the business.  We shouldn’t be asking IT to deliver “generic” value.  We should be asking IT to deliver specific value, to make changes that will meet specific business goals.  And that requires that the business describe their strategies in terms of specific business goals.

Getting alignment to “generic value” is like having a teenager tell you that their room is clean.  Too many definitions of the word.

Alignment without specificity is not possible.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2011
    ... so i am wondering - what is now a "specific" value ?  how is it quantified (both the generic and the specific) ? what could be an example of a specific value and its measurement...

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2011
    Agree that confusions about value (and particularly the frequent error of confusing cost or price with value) can make life for an enterprise-architect very hard. But to me one of the key tasks of the EA is to identify what 'value' means in the enterprise - it's a key anchor to the whole architecture. In particular, start from value - not solely from the IT...

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2011
    I would humbly disagree with the statement that "Alignment without specificity is not possible.". I would restate as "Alignment without specificity is possible, just not useful." :)

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2011
    @gerold: Specific value is value that supports a specific, measurable, business goal.   @Jan: I agree that IT must deliver the ability to compose information elements into valuable assets.  On the other hand, we cannot deliver the composability without measuring the value without at least one specific tie to measurable value.  The advantage of doing this: the first few compositions of information have a low ROI because of the cost of infrastructure development, but after that, the ROI skyrockets.  That's a good story to tell. @Tom: I completely agree... value is not only an IT question.  That said, IT must care about value.  EA typically lives in IT because IT is normally the only organization able to put up with us. :-) @Mitch: LOL.  "Nonspecific alignment" is an oxymoron.