Efficiency. It’s that ever illustrious goal that every IT professional and leader endeavours toward. But, even with maximum effort and precision planning, efforts in the pursuit of ultimate efficiency can fail to hit their intended targets.
According to Kumar Krishnamurthy, a principal with PwC’s Strategy Consulting Group, we must move our focus toward improving effectiveness and the experience for the user.
Focusing on the needs of the business, not just technology
Merim Becirovic, IT managing director at business and technology consulting firm Accenture, says that businesses can become stuck when making decisions as a result of the sheer number of new capabilities the market has made available.
Becirovic thinks this kind of technology-first approach leads to tools and services being adopted that don’t adapt to user needs.
In our new role, we need to enable businesses and help them uncover new streams of revenue. Concurrently, we must focus on the specific needs of the customer and the growth potential of any technology in alignment with overarching organisational goals.
Relationship building
Director in operations excellence practice at West Monroe Partners, Colleen Campbell, says that in order to achieve maximum potential efficiency, we must connect with business stakeholders.
“If a technology leader can state clearly how their technology choices have impact ROI, business leaders will listen and see the line that is drawn from cost to benefit.”
“This is accomplished through relationship building, stakeholder management, communications strategies, program management, metrics, skill capabilities, cultural alignment to goals, and organisational changes.”
CTO of digital design agency SPR, Matt Mead, says there needs to be a sense that business and IT leaders have worked together in projecting and implementing the IT needs for the upcoming year.
Developing IT plans in a vacuum or simply duplicating the strategy of the previous year can lead to significant inefficiencies and affect the businesses ability to remain competitive.
The Cloud
The cloud offers efficiency like never before. Almost any organisation can become more efficient by leveraging the power of cloud / SaaS / IaaS offerings.
These services are designed with agility in mind and allow businesses to scale up or down as they need while leveraging best-of-breed solutions to fulfil the ever changing needs of an organisation.
Gabe Girodano, chair of the MIS department of Ohio University, says that while data centre to cloud migration costs can be rather high, the medium to long-term cost savings are worth it. The lower physical infrastructure expenses, combined with reduced IT management and user support costs can produce significant cost-savings over time.
“The rapidly increasing cost of IT security will make these savings even more significant in many settings moving forward.”
