Expertise in Economics of IT
The role of a CIO or a Senior IT Manager is often very challenging. Your CEO probably sees IT as a cost center, same as administration or billing or HR, and while they see the value of having it, they often approach it with a rather firm cost-cutting mindset. The current global crisis doesn't help either, and many CIOs have to deal with either flat, or even shrinking IT budgets.
This situation certainly doesn't help you to transform your job from being an administrator to being a leader, especially when any IT innovation project is first considered from the cost point of view. Simply put, without being able to show his value contribution to bottom line, the CIO is often in a disadvantaged position in the boardroom, compared to, for example, the CFO or COO or CTO.
You know that it is possible to change the rules of the game. However, it is a hard, uphill battle. In every IT initiative, you have to be firmly focused on benefits, business value added, the big picture. You have to sell virtually every IT initiative on benefits. It will not be easy, it will not happen overnight. At first, your co-managers will approach your statements with suspicion or even disbelief. But if you use the time you have on the job to deliver these benefits, over and over, the disbelief will change into hope, the suspicion will change into trust.
There is one little, yet exceedingly important problem. How do you measure the contribution of an IT project to bottom line? It is not easy. IT activities are often far removed from what makes your company's revenue. Not only you can't measure IT's share of revenue generation or cost avoidance directly, but often you have to go through far-fetched assumptions, which open you to more criticism and disbelief.
This is where we come in. Through our long experience with this problem, we have come up with innovative solutions. And we are not talking about fuzzy, bullet-point benefit statements. We are talking about real money-in-the-bank statements, signed off by real boardrooms over and over. If you want to see samples or get us to help us with your project, contact us at partners@intellico-solutions.com