Nowadays, organizations demand faster response times from their IT departments. Speed is the new currency due to changing markets and disruptive technologies, as our CEO Francisco Perez van der Oord already pointed out in one of our newsletters. With technology moving in a high pace, IT departments have difficulties maintaining the legacy environments while at the same time, businesses want their IT resources ‘yesterday’.
Equally important to realize: it’s ever more needed to know the WHY of your business, and therefore, the WHY of your IT department. In many years as project manager I’ve witnessed IT departments either struggle to identify their business requirements, or, even worse, dictate the requirements for their businesses, often lead by technological possibilities.
At ITQ, we’ve accomplished many projects for customers: we’ve implemented new products of all kinds and we’ve built complete solutions. From a project point of view we’re doing a fine job. However, when we followed up after some time, more than once it turned out the new solution or implementation was partly used or sometimes not at all. We started to investigate reasons behind this phenomenon and we found a number of causes. Sometimes, the solution didn’t fulfil the actual needs; it was built based assumed requirements. Sometimes knowledge of the new product wasn’t present. Sometimes people just didn’t see the need for a new solution reverting to their usual methods of working. And we’ve found several other reasons as well, only to realize these could have been identified, and could have been dealt with, earlier on.
We decided we needed to take more time at the start of a project. Instead of discussing the end results, we started to ask questions. Why are you implementing this? What is the real issue you’re trying to solve? What is the new solution going to bring to your IT department? How will your business benefit from this? Is your IT department ready for this change? Which IT and/or business processes are affected? From there on, we developed a new strategy: take time to develop a plan, based on input of all stakeholders, covering organization, processes and technology.
ITQ's IT Transformation Services (ITTS) exactly does this: we assist IT organizations to develop a strategy, create awareness, because we believe involvement of the organization, both IT and business, is key for the success of a project. Ask questions. Ask for creativity. Knowledge is present in your IT department: make sure you use it. Match your IT goals with your business goals. Broadcast what you’re about to do, based on a solid plan.
Our goal is not only to implement disruptive technology, but also make sure it’s properly maintained by qualified IT administrators, well fitted in processes and strongly utilized by businesses, making sure organizations have a real competitive edge.
