In the devleopment of IT strategy across the many organisations I have worked in I have observed that one of the main failings is that when people think IT… they primarily think of the T, not the I.
Technology is what people see, computers, laptops, phones, software. These are tools and generally create the bulk of the reactive work. Reactive work is bad, it takes up all your time, it’s existence means that something is not working correctly and that means inefficiency.
I hate inefficiency.
Where the real gains come from is in the analysis of the “I” part, the information. Think about it, your business benefits most where information is available immediately. Whether that is from quick responding systems, easily searchable files, workflow completion or access to information in another way. The quicker and easier those data flows are the more efficient your business is… and efficiency means profit.
This is what I call the “Information Value Chain”, the type, content and flow of information from the start of your business process to the end.
Let’s say you manufacture a widget. Your value chain consists of raw material suppliers, production, testing, sales and after-sales support. That’s one way of looking at it, the stadard value chain, but what about how those elements join together?
Historically each part of the process probably had a paper-based set of forms to complete, to be passed to the next stage in order to prove quality and process stadards have been met. We now do this electronically, but in my experience, whilst each part has become electronic (aka different teams with different spreadsheets and databases) rarely have organisations looked at the bigger strategic information picture.
Using systems thinking (looking at what goes in and out of each process) and analysing the information flow provides considerable opportunities for reducing duplication, centralising data and removing wasted effort.
The goal is to provide only one source of each information type. For instance, you might have seperate HR and ERP systems, but you should still define that the single source of truth for HR data is the HR system. Often what happens is, due to lack of integration or effort, HR data is exported into reports or spreadsheets so that various different teams can use the parts they need. The correct way to do this is to give the end users direct access to the HR data they need without the need for the middle-man. One way to do this is to provide a proxy database, with restricted views into each of the other databases which provide the information only to the users that need it without the need for them to ever go near the original data. Easy if you have one central database, but many organisations are running multiple data sources from multiple vendors, so whatever can’t be accessed directly should be made available live via another method.
Obviously, security needs to be maintain via the use of roles. It doesn’t take much to assess who needs what information and define roles that allow access to only the parts required. What takes a long time is defining exactly what information the organisation has in the first place and where it should be kept (uniquely).
An organisation’s information value chain is likely to be the single biggest source of efficiency savings when correctly improved.
Strategic thinking is about Information, then technology. Not the other way around.