Remember January – It’s over. Not the recession, but the concern that we might be headed into the next great depression. Now it just looks like the worst recession in decades.

After a heavy focus on sharp cost cutting many organizations are now starting loosen up and restart the strategic programs that were cancelled and delayed earlier in the year. For IT this means that the pendulum is about to swing in the opposite direction as companies respond to the strategic move of their competitors, rapid mergers and acquisitions, operations consolidations, changes in customer behavior, product mix & government stimulus.

I expect that there will be a wave of new business demands that the IT organization will need to address in order to maximize the opportunity that exists as we move from expected depression, stagflation, and recession to slow to moderate growth. These challenges will be hard to address with staffing thin, strategic programs stalled and resources focused on short term ROI initiatives.

Here are 5 ideas to help you prepare for the next wave of IT investment:

1) Hire to the bench

Preemptively hire key skills and talent, taking advantage of the current job market.

2) Implement strategic and tactical vendor relationships -

with service providers with critical high demand skills such as Business Intelligence, BPM & SOA

3) Work with HR and the executive team to create innovative staff retention strategies for key IT team members.

If your staff has experienced salary caps, reductions, 401k match eliminations, tuition reimbursement eliminations then they may be lured away by competitors who can make them whole again. (Think GE’s rapid stimulus funded growth in electronic medical records?)

4) Loyalty is an emotion.

Get on the floor and tell team members how much you appreciate their hard work and commitment during the last 9 months. Take them to lunch and spoil them!

5) “Just did it”

Create a culture of action and results and reward accordingly.

IT organizations are under increasing pressure to align investments and operations expenses with the needs of the business, and in many cases this has become a reality. But the results are frequently disappointing. So what comes next?

I believe that the goal of IT & Business alignment is to ensure that all IT investments and operations activities are oriented towards creating and maximizing value-added products and services for the end customer. The IT organization should have a process driven focus on the systemic identification, reduction and where possible elimination of non-value add processes and activities.

In most businesses the IT organization predominantly serves internal customers who act as proxies for the end customer. One of the challenges with this approach is that it assumes that the business correctly understands the stated and unstated goals and desires of customers and is able to translate them with high-fidelity to the IT organization for action. Similarly it assumes that the IT organization can correctly hear and determine the goals of the customer as echoed by the sales/marketing/product management organization.

I have seen many examples where this is not the case. The end result is an investment or process change that is implemented on-time, on-budget and with good quality that misses the mark in the eye’s of the customer. When these situations occur it’s useful to identify if anyone from the IT organization actually spent time face to face with the customer to determine their goals, priorities and motivations. Frequently, this did not happen.

Today’s IT Strategy

Today, many IT strategies are striving to implement Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based technical strategies, but these efforts run the risk of delivering sub-optimal business results due to a lack of strategic alignment with the customer.

While SOA and BPM provide ways to reduce development and maintenance costs, reduce time to implement changes and enable new features and functions, the benefits will not be realized if the IT strategy does not accurately take into account the current and future goals and aspirations of end customers. There are important strategic considerations that are being decided within the IT organization on prioritizing and selecting and scheduling these investments and unless there is a planned customer orientation it’s very likely that the investment won’t translate into the desired customer benefits.

If you are planning to implement SOA or BPM or already have these investments well under way, but are concerned about the lack of end results to the business, The Pennell Group can help. We will assess the current status of your IT strategy and deliver creative, value added solutions that maximize the impact of these investments.

The Pennell Group will take you from here:

IT Business Alignment -> SOA & BPM -> XXX MIXED RESULT XXX

To Here:

Strategic Customer Alignment -> SOA & BPM -> BUSINESS SUCCESS!!!