Building a Business Case for the CIO’s Digital Initiatives:
Digital technology is everywhere today. The impact of social media, online applications, multimedia, cloud computing, interoperable systems, and mobile devices is beyond dispute. For many CIOs and IT professionals supporting digital initiatives, the “what” of digital is not the challenge. It’s the “how” as in how to articulate business value to justify strategic digital initiatives.
To better understand this challenge, we need to step back and look at the impact of the digital wave on the IT organization. Even a few years ago, digital was perceived as something primarily focused on mobile apps and developing content to be delivered by mobile devices. It was driven by a response to customers’ expectations for technology and brand interaction. Traditional areas of IT that were making technology decisions focused on operational efficiencies, cost savings and “keeping the lights on” were suddenly being led by outward-facing business functions such as sales and marketing. The digital solution demand exposed gaps in core IT skills that were primarily focused on Tier-1 support rather than customer-centric mobile app development.
Today, the gaps are closing as digital becomes business as usual, thereby changing the IT leader’s role in important ways. CIOs are now responsible for a wider and more complex range of technology enablement projects for customers and, increasingly, for employees. At the same time, digital projects require a larger number of approvals─many of them outside the IT function─and often give rise to new processes for approvals and budgeting that are not structured around established IT priorities and investment strategies.
Five point to be consider
As an IT business owner, you can lead a growing range of digital technology projects, whether it’s implementing new platforms, deploying mobile solutions or updating existing systems using human-centric design. In all cases, you still need to tie digital to business value in order to justify spending. Five points that need to be considered
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