Optimize IT Decisions

There has never been a time in history when more pressure has been applied to the Office of the CIO (OCIO). In today’s world the walls between IT and the business have been irrevocably torn down. IT and the business are tied together, and their mutual success depends on strong communication and collaboration between them.

The single most important task that the OCIO must perform, that has the most profound impact on the success or failure of a business, is making optimized IT decisions.

IT Complexity

Optimizing IT decisions is enormously complex and difficult. The very nature of how IT historically has been implemented from the bottom-up to automate specific business processes, coupled with the fact IT is a complex heterogeneous environment with a conglomerate of mismatched tools, redundant people, processes and technology, makes the ability of gaining holistic transparency to IT nearly impossible. IT management has become a large multidimensional optimization problem.

The IT environment is not going to become less complex anytime soon. Businesses can count on the fact that complexity will continue to increase as new technology and IT innovations are introduced to improve various aspects of operational efficiency.

How do businesses optimize decisions today?

So how does the OCIO accomplish delivering optimized decisions for the business in the current environment? The simple answer is they “best guess”, or worse yet they don’t act. The complexity is too great to manually achieve accurate and timely information. In most cases the OCIO can achieve snapshots of information from siloed decision support tools. Typical business decisions are often narrowly focused on a small number of inputs. CIOs can deploy BI solutions that extract information, aggregate it to data warehouses, and then provide a variety of analytics on top of that data mart. The shortcoming of the data warehouse approach is that the aggregated data isn’t correlated to predefined expected business metrics nor does it have context back to the business goals and priorities.

The fundamental challenge

Businesses face enormous competitive pressure in the modern business world. Those who are nimble and able to make optimized business decisions will win out. Failure of IT to adapt can result in customer dissatisfaction and failure of the entire business.

What is the solution?

The OCIO needs an authoritative IT system that takes a top-down approach to IT optimization. The system needs to capture business strategies and goals and instantiate them to IT. The system needs to provide collaboration between business stakeholders and IT to establish practices, prioritization, cost and capabilities of the services and initiatives to be delivered and the metrics by which they will be measured. The system needs to apply correlation and business context across those defined practices back to the goals and strategies and allow for continuous accurate evaluation of business performance outside planning cycles. Finally the system needs to provide an IT decision management capability that provides reports, active analytics, predictive analytics, visualizations, simulations and optimizations to derive the holistic transparency back to the OCIO. Only when the information has context back to the business strategies and goals, and IT practices are correlated to each other with context to defined metrics, can IT decision management tools provide the necessary transparency for OCIO members to make optimized decisions for the business.

What does Emerald City look like?

IT and the business will work from a common business model, and speak a common language. IT and business management will both have dashboards that provide active analysis and visualizations on current performance of the business to agreed-upon metrics. IT and business management will have a set of predictive analytics tools to provide “what if” models to gain calculated insights to practice changes and the derived impact to processes, people and technology. IT and business management will have the ability to describe an ideal business model, describe desired outcomes and put them into measured action. Additionally, IT planning will be able to simulate what-if business options and run an optimization algorithm to generate best-case alternative service delivery models.

Gravitant has the answer

With Gravitant the CIO and the OCIO have that system to unify business and IT. IT decisions can be optimized from a top-down approach to achieve optimized IT service delivery back for the business. With Gravitant, IT and the business will speak a common language and work from a common business model. Decisions will not be “best guesses” but be informed and be substantiated. Gravitant empowers the business with optimized decisions to maximize business performance.

Learn more about how Gravitant can unify business and IT:

Gravitant Solutions

IT Management for Project Management Office (IT PMO)

IT Management for Network Service Operations (IT NSO)

IT Management for Vendor Management Office (IT VMO)