IT Spending Is Not Like Your Phone Bill: You Need a Clear Plan to Deliver Results

Ultimately, the best use of technology is to create unique and powerful digital customer experiences that propel your brand's message in the market forward. Most companies, instead, see IT as a necessary evil, kind of like their phone bill or other utilities.

In many companies that were founded prior to the past 25 years, the constant demands of IT spending seem overwhelming.

There is a seemingly never-ending list of projects, each of which gets more demanding (not less) after implementation, and it is often not clear what impact these projects have directly on revenue. In order to stop the bleeding, most companies have one of the following approaches: Worse, many (most?) projects at some companies never really see the light of day, much less deliver the promised business value.... at least before the next "named initiative" comes along.

In the face of this, many companies throw up their hands:

* First, outsource to the cheapest possible provider to get the most "bang for the buck"

* When that doesn't work, insource to the cheapest possible employees to get more control over results.

But insource or outsource, the cycle keeps repeating ....

The solution is straightforward in principle, but hard in reality:

1 - align senior leadership on a clear, and small, list of company-wide priorities,

2 - identify the strategies and initiatives whose goals are moving those priorities forward,

3 - identify the experiences needed to produce those results,

4 - which then tells you what areas you need to invest in, and

5 - understand the milestones and markers that you can use to identify progress along the way, so projects aren't killed prematurely

This is something I work with clients on constantly. If you start with 4, you will inevitably fail because you skipped over steps. To be clear, business cases can be ill-formed of unclear. They can be guesses. If your top priorities (#1) are clear, the organization can identify when things aren't contributing enough to targets (#5), or perhaps you are seeing progress but not as much as you expected.

Often that is OK. Bill Gates used to say that people vastly overestimate what they can achieve in a year, but vastly underestimate what they can achieve in 10 years.

But to do this, your approach needs to be methodical and built around a clear execution plan which is coordinated across the organization. If there isn't CEO involvement and clear alignment, then you don't even have a fighting chance of seeing any results, much less the results your Board thinks you need to produce.