5 Key Components of IT Effectiveness

Few IT organizations seek to truly understand internal business units' perception of IT's impact and the importance the business units place on the five components of IT delivery. This insight is critical to becoming an effective IT organization that impacts the business. It's easy for IT to focus on one component, such as availability, but that pigeonholes the IT organization as a just utility provider. CIOs might boast of a 99% availability record, but if the users don't perceive a greater value in IT than as a utility provider, they'll only care about the 1% of the time the network is down.

To become a truly effective IT organization, it is vital to understand the customer's expectations and how you're performing according to those expectations. IT organizations must find a method that is simultaneously easy to administer and intuitive from both the IT and user perspective.

One method we have found that is both useful and widely applicable is the RATER method, as outlined in Valarie Zeithaml's Delivering Quality Service: RATER measures IT's value in Reliability, Assurance (knowledge, quality and credibility of the staff), Tangible (physical aspects of IT's communication, documents and processes) , Empathy (does IT relate to user concerns and issues) and Responsiveness. It is a qualitative and quantitative method that can help provide customized solutions to improve IT effectiveness.

In our experience with effectiveness, we've often discovered the "perception" gaps are bigger than the "reality" gaps. That is to say, IT's customers - and often, the IT organization itself - see the difference between IT's effectiveness as it stands and where it should be as greater than it truly is. Whether real or perceived or somewhere in between, however, such gaps must be addressed. We suggest taking firm and direct action to bridge them by:

• Confirming the Joint Strategic Agendas that IT should be working on with the business.

• Identifying an intuitive method to understand perception v. reality - such as the RATER system mentioned above.

• Engaging in a dialog with key IT stakeholders, executives and line managers to understand their expectations and how capabilities line up (both in reality and perception).

• Working with key IT partners to develop a plan to address any "reality" or "perception" gaps.

  In the last 15 years, the amount of the average corporate budget devoted to IT has risen dramatically, as have the expectations of IT's customers – the functional leaders and the end users. The proper mindset for any CIO is to produce greater value to the organization, to be effective as well as efficient, and to engender the idea that IT is a good value, not just a necessary expense.

  About the author: Gerald Shields is Practice Director, Healthcare IT for The Nolan Company. Gerald has over 30 years’ experience managing enterprise scale IT functions, with a focus on enabling the business through effective automation. At Aflac, he served as CIO and in senior IT management for over ten years, and is a respected thought leader and innovator in the areas of IT management systems, technology strategy, and mobile technology.

  

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