In today’s modern business, it takes more than a great product and people to find success. The landscape is dynamic and barriers to entry are lower, making for a noisy and competitive market. To stand out from the competition and capture market share, you need to leverage technology to increase productivity, enable innovation through collaboration, and create impactful customer experiences.
Lack of alignment between IT and business leaders is a significant hurdle to competitive advantage. It can result in IT being viewed as a cost center versus a value center, inconsistent decision-making or a negative impact on the time to value from the investment. All of these outcomes get in the way of truly optimized returns on IT investments.
As a line of business owner, you may be making decisions about technology without engaging IT for all or part of the process. Meanwhile, your IT peers are focusing on the needs of all the business units while creating a cohesive IT roadmap. This is not only frustrating but there are downsides to this lack of alignment that you should be aware of and mitigate.
1. Security Risks
Enterprises today are a growing target of sophisticated cyber-criminal operations that are looking to exploit their way into large payments and/or accessing important data. When projects are not aligned with a company’s roadmap, planning for breaches like these are often missed. There are also regulatory/compliance issues, brand equity, trust, and strategic intellectual property that could be leaked. Your IT department is the first and last line of defense, and lack of alignment with them puts everyone at risk.
2. Technology Roadmap
Your IT department is investing significantly in your organization’s long-term technology infrastructure, and thinking about how systems and applications can talk to each other and leverage each others’ data. By utilizing a disjointed roadmap, you could be building silos of information that won’t fit into that vision, ultimately causing more work or even making it impossible to achieve long-term goals.
3. Wasted Economies of Scale
It’s not uncommon to find out that multiple departments have overlapping costs due to lack of communication or suboptimal decision-making. When this happens, you end up with additional costs caused by scrambling for solutions. Even though each department has their own needs, the service and/or solution can, most likely, be bought through a single distributor giving you more leverage to negotiate or bulk pricing for the license. Getting the economics right is key to the business and freeing up more budget to innovate down the road.
So, how do you avoid the pitfalls of misalignment but still leverage the technology you need, when you need it?
That’s where Amplix can help. We can act as the bridge between business and IT leaders. It’s an proven process, here’s how it goes:
- We help you define your outcomes, needs and requirements then find the best solutions for you to consider.
- We will help you build the business case.
- We will help align the business requirements with your IT department’s decision maker(s) and have a discussion about their current state and future roadmap, and how your needs can be met and aligned.
- We work with IT on vendor selection, negotiation, and implementation on expedited timeframes given our experience across 1000’s of projects, benchmarking data and the collective buying power of hundreds of organizations
- We work with IT to support you on an ongoing basis, shortening time to resolution on issues and identifying opportunities to innovate further.
The first step in enabling and empowering your department without compromising your IT team’s operations is having a conversation with Amplix. Let’s talk today!
