What's the one thing, that if improved at your company, would have the biggest impact on how IT's value is perceived throughout the entire organization? Even if it's something out of your control.
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Leadership discipline. A big reason why we have major delays on strategic initiatives is because requirements change far too often.
Improve cross-functional delivery capabilities. A right mix of business professionals, subject matter experts and product expertise within technology teams tend to increase IT's value contributing to better revenues / margins, compared to the teams having only technical expertise. Also broad range of technical skills can help to change the perception about value of IT.
We are working very hard to break down the walls and partner with the plant engineering organization to merge traditional business IT and the company's Operational Technology hardware and data.
We have not leveraged the data that exists nor harvested the data we could be collecting to enhance our ability to make better business decisions and drive our business. The key is plant leadership and IT leadership understanding the business value of implementing this transformation.
The IT organization has started providing operational support for network, servers and security, doing the things we are good at operationally and freeing the plant engineering group to do the things they do well. It has been difficult building the trust to make that happen but we are making progress.
Richer partnerships between IT and business to break the legacy of "division" between them. This takes more effort to establish and sustain, but means IT is valued as a true contributor to strategy setting, and also IT has the humility to recognise that often the business knows more about where the business value from IT may reside. There can be less temptation to view IT just as cost if these kinds of partnerships are established.
Some excellent inputs here so I'll attempt to supplement them rather than suggest 'the one thing'.
I would really like to see the creation/sponsorship of a 'task force' team that is focused strategically on 'key business problems'. Seperated from the usual team structures, and prioritised around business value and opportunities, they can drive forward on specific topics with cross-functional team members. This should be a team of the 'best', could also be on rotation, and sponsored from the top. I don't think the entire IT org should be organised this way, but I do think one or two teams running like this could make a big difference infront of the entire organisation.