Leading firms move beyond IT biz alignment

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Leading firms move beyond IT, biz alignment

Leaders adopt balanced IT practices to achieve multiple business outcomes from customer satisfaction to revenue and profit growth, says Unisys survey

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

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NEW DELHI, INDIA: IT firms that were innovative in adopting best practices for IT services delivery were more effective than others in achieving desired business results, said a research from Unisys Corp.

Such organizations focused on multiple value-based outcomes affecting service, reputation and growth besides traditional operational considerations such as efficiency and cost reduction.

The research was based on interviews with 550 IT executives worldwide. Of the survey respondents, 139 companies – 25 per cent of those surveyed – emerged as leaders based on their effectiveness at managing IT resources to achieve key business objectives.

The study showed that leading organizations focused their priorities beyond cost cutting, which was conventionally viewed as the primary business driver of IT best practices. They created service delivery models that employed a balanced mix of practices involving people, process and automation to execute, adjust and innovate in achieving multiple important business objectives.

Leaders were also more likely to look outside the organization and draw from outsourcing partners to improve their best practices. "These survey results indicate IT executives' growing realization that the greatest benefits come when they focus on innovation in IT service management to achieve business results," said Bart De Maertelaere, vice president, IT Outsourcing Strategy, Unisys Global Outsourcing and Infrastructure Services.

"To be leaders, IT executives must adopt proven best practices that enable truly collaborative innovation between their organization and the businesses they serve," he added.

Those who emerged as leaders in IT best practices consistently placed a significantly higher premium on customer-focused outcomes than the entire survey population.

While all companies ranked cost reduction as an important outcome, the leaders chose value-based outcomes such as customer satisfaction/up sell, customer loyalty/retention and increased business agility as more important. Those are the outcomes affecting the organization's service, reputation and growth.

Understandably, the IT leaders also saw stimulating innovation and creativity as a more important business outcome than the rest of the sample: 81 per cent of them ranked it as very important, compared to only 52 percent of the others.

The IT leaders' tendency to focus more on relationships – apparent in their high ranking of customer satisfaction and retention as key business outcomes – extends to how the organization delivers services.

While the leaders were no more likely to use outsourcing as a means of IT services delivery than non-leaders, they employ a different style when they do outsource.

They said that they build partnerships with outside providers so they can draw on the partners' expertise to improve service delivery, rather than just treat them as vendors of a service. Among the IT leaders, 48 per cent said that their outsourcing partners improve best practices, compared to 39 per cent among the other companies.

"Best-practices improvements are critical over the life of an outsourcing relationship," said De Maertelaere. "By forging a strategic partnership with outsourcers, CIOs can work with providers to help ensure that infrastructure and applications remain innovative and keep pace with changing business needs."

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