Two leaders in value measurement join forces to create Mainstay Salire
As businesses adjust to the “new normal” we keep hearing from people that there is a consensus that innovation will play an important role in our new world. Whether we are talking about information technology to drive employee productivity or transportation systems that move our products around more quickly and efficiently. Read more
I found this article and thought it was worth re-posting. It is written by Art Langer from Columbia University All credit goes to him.
http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/IT-Management/Presenting-to-Your-Board-of-Directors-760501/
If you’re summoned to answer to your board of directors, it’s critical that you understand the top issues your directors are look at today.
CIOs often talk about “having a seat at the table.” This usually means reporting directly to the CEO and being engaged in all key strategic meetings within the firm. But many CIOs still do not report directly to their CEO—a controversy that continues to be discussed at many senior management meetings. At the same time, an increasing number of CIOs tell me they are being asked to present to their company’s board of directors—the ultimate “seat” of exposure. Here are four key points for you to bear in mind: Read more
This month’s blog posting is about how SAP works with its customers to demonstrate the business value of deploying SAP software and service solutions.
For the last 8 years SAP has operated a team they call the Value Engineering team. This is made up of people who do industry benchmarking, value engineering and customer value engagements. This team has delivered thousands of business cases to their customers about business transformation and has a significant impact on how enterprise customers value SAP. Read more
In Part 1 of this blog we established the concept that a technology business case needs to be multi-lingual and provide for the different needs of the people involved in the buying process. In this posting we will dig deeper into what each of the buyers is looking for in order to secure their buy-in.
The four buying roles we described were; the executive buyer, economic buyer, technology buyer and line-of business buyer. Here are the things each of these buyers are looking for:
We all know that communication is an art. The skill of explaining things in ways that people can understand is one of the missing links in the relationship between technologists and business people.
I have witnessed many presentations from IT professionals and technology sales people where they communicate the technical attributes and features of their technology project and leave out critical elements needed in the budget approval process. Unfortunately this isn’t an effective strategy and it promotes confusion, doubt and most importantly delays in the process of securing budget.
Conventional wisdom holds that if you aren’t selling your story to the most senior executives in a business, you won’t win approval for your IT project—whether as a salesperson or an IT executive. While sales people are told to “sell at the C-level” and they often do get the meeting, many times it’s without an appropriate goal or sufficient preparation. They walk out of the C-level meeting high-fiving each other, thinking it was a good meeting, but in reality nothing really has happened. The sales process hasn’t been advanced, they haven’t secured a senior level internal advocate, and they may have actually hurt the cause more than helped it. Read more
They say timing is everything – and they’re right – especially when it comes to the cost of deploying complex IT systems. With the right cost allocation strategy, you can speed return on investment and significantly reduce the overall cost of rolling out a new technology.
In our experience, it’s very common for vendors and customers to attempt to do their own financial analysis for justifying IT projects. But we rarely see examples where there is a core foundation to the way they are doing the analysis. Typically these efforts focus around cost inputs and expected savings and/or benefits from the project. These are obviously required elements of an accurate financial analysis but they are not foundational elements. The financial models these types of efforts create are one dimensional. For complex projects this approach is not only ill-advised, it produces incorrect results. They only account for the “what” factor of the project. Read more
