Thursday, June 18, 2020

Ways to Be More Strategic with IT

Over the past few months, IT has been incredibly tactical for many companies. Enabling the shift to remote work and maintaining or adjusting business operations has been a full-time job. As the initial shock has passed, there has been a chance for reflection while also looking forward. What lessons were learned from the crisis? And what actions can help mitigate risk in the future?

One takeaway from the transitions has been that the companies that navigated things well were those that were already prepared beforehand, not necessarily those that built plans the fastest. While no one could have expected a disruption of this magnitude, some companies had been making strides toward a mobile workforce or a cloud-based architecture. Those types of actions may not have addressed immediate problems at the time, but they were built with an eye on the future.

CompTIA’s whitepaper on Using Strategic IT for Competitive Advantage describes the way that IT operations have evolved. IT used to be much more of a tactical support function; now it plays a key role in helping businesses grow and compete. As we continue to rebuild from the shock of the pandemic, here are four pieces to a strategic IT mindset:
Think about the top line vs. the bottom line

For most of the past 50 years, IT has been thought of as a cost center. Companies either tried to keep the same level of tech ability while trimming cost or incrementally build their technology on a flat budget. In a strategic approach, though, the finances are handled differently. Now there are investments being made with the expectation of some kind of return to the business. This means that IT pros need to build the skill of calculating ROI. Rather than saying “We need to spend this money or the system might fail,” they need to say “spending this money will lead to improved metrics.” This takes an understanding of how the investment is connected to the metrics and also understanding which metrics are most important to business units.
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