The ultimate goal of IT Transformation is to drive strategic business value. To do this, IT organizations must develop a service culture which is highly innovative, competitive within the broad marketplace and offers the business complete transparency in its governance, operations and financial costs and constraints.
CastlePointe offers the following workshops on driving Business Value:
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Executive Series Topic EI-1: Creating a Service Culture to Drive Innovation |
The ultimate goal of any IT organization should be to drive innovation that creates strategic value for the business. To do this requires many things, but it begins by creating a service culture that shifts the viewpoint of the entire IT organization away from the technical aspects of technology and creates an overarching business perspective to everything IT does. This topic explores how IT organizations can make this shift and begin the evolution to becoming an innovation partner. |
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Executive Series Topic EI-2: Innovative by Design: Creating an IT Organizational Structure Built for Innovation |
As an IT organization begins to evolve, they often find that their own structure begins to hold them back. The traditional siloed structures of "applications" and "infrastructure" divide the IT organization along technology domains. To create an innovation-driven IT organization, it must be organized in a way that supports the service culture and creates opportunities for innovation to take place. This topic explores new ways to structure IT organizations around product groups, customer segments and other business-driven clusters designed to drive innovation. (Available Q3 2010) |
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Executive Series Topic EI-3: Competing in the Marketplace |
Over the last few years, there has been a fundamental shift that has introduced a new challenge for IT leaders: competition. Sure, there has always been various forms of outsourcing, but the advent of cloud computing and ubiquitous, rapidly evolving social technologies has fundamentally changed the expectations and option for both business leaders and everyday users alike. Senior IT leaders must rally and transform their organizations in order to effectively compete in the marketplace for the hearts and wallets of their customers. |
| Topic EI-4: The Key to Partnership: Intimacy | The term "partnership" is thrown around a lot these days. In its truest sense, a partnership means a shared responsibility to achieve a specific goal. That requires a much deeper relationship than most IT organizations have with the business. This kind of deep relationship relies on trust and requires something that is foreign to most IT leaders and managers: intimacy. Intimacy means becoming so involved that the IT organization no longer speaks in terms of "requirements" and "portfolios", but about business objectives and then delivers technology-enabled innovation to help achieve them. This topic explores what intimacy really means and how to create it. |
| Topic EI-5: Building Your Business into Your IT Architecture | It is getting tougher and tougher for IT organizations to compete with the many vendors who would love to provide services directly to the business. Whether from traditional outsourcers or more recently the many Cloud and SaaS providers, IT is under constant threat of competition. To compete effectively, IT must begin to operate like these service providers and build architectures that continuously get more efficient and less expensive. This topic explores strategies to rethink how IT architectures are developed from a perspective of enabling business growth and innovation. (Available Q4 2010) |
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Executive Series Topic EI-6: Building a Transparent Organization |
A true partnership doesn't exist until there is trust between the two parties. Trust is built on a foundation that there are no secrets - what you see is what you get. Yet most IT organizations continue to have a veil of opaqueness that makes it difficult for the business to understand how decisions are made and what things cost. So most IT organizations continue to struggle with creating a true partnership with the business. To solve this, IT executives must create transparent, service-based organizations that will remove the final obstacle to true business partnership. |
| Topic EI-7: Creating Transparency through Governance and IT Funding | A foundational element of evolving IT into a true innovation partner is transparency. If the business feels that IT is a black hole and they cannot get a simple and true understanding of how decisions are made or how much IT services cost, they will not trust that IT can deliver what they need. This topic explores how IT organizations can rethink governance structures and build new IT funding models to create this type of transparency. (Available Q4 2010) |
Thoughts, Ideas & Real World Experiences About Transforming IT Organizations
We in the Service Management industry have made a big deal about putting our services in the context of business value. That is the right thing to do, but it is misaligned when we discuss the value of Service Management. The cold, hard truth about Service Management is that it has no value in-and-of itself. "Finding Value in Service Management" delves into how the real value of Service Management is only found when…
Let's face it, sometimes we're literally thrown into an IT/business relationship with no history, faced to come up with a quick solution and expected to deliver results that show value to our customers. "Communications: Building and Maintaining Effective Business Relationships" discusses why the power of the liaison position can be an outstanding way to build and maintain effective business relationships that do just that.
The most well run organizations in the world are masters at defining and understanding their markets and customer segments. World class IT organizations should be no different. Our latest article, "Creating a Service Portfolio Through Markets and Customer Segments," discusses how to create a service portfolio that is both relevant and designed to deliver optimal value to your customers.
While traditional performance management practices focus on fixing individual and team weaknesses, this presentation explores strengths-based strategies for increasing team performance, team member fulfillment and overall project results.
Your company may be giving IT vendors more help with their innovation than your own. Our latest article,"Are You Leveraging Your Vendors for Innovation?"discusses how to work with your vendors to not only implement innovation in their products and services, but how to leverage your strategic vendors to help your company's innovation and improve the value of IT to your business.
