Daily Archives: November 19, 2011
We would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge innovate products that we see trending as disruptors…in a good way. Among them are two companies that I am really excited about: Fusion-io (and not because the Woz is their Chief Scientist) and Nutanix.
If you haven’t already heard of these 2 companies, here’s a quick intro:
- Fusion-io is a pioneer of a new storage memory platform that significantly improves the processing capabilities within a data center by moving process-critical, or active data closer to the CPU where it is processed. Called shared data decentralization, this significantly reduces latency while increasing data center efficiency. Fusion’s integrated hardware and software solutions leverage non-volatile memory for enterprise-grade performance, reliability, availability and manageability.
- Nutanix is the first company to offer a radically simple compute and storage infrastructure for implementing enterprise-class virtualization without complex and expensive network storage (SAN or NAS). The company was founded by a team that has built scalable systems like Google File System and enterprise-class systems like Oracle Database/Exadata in the past, and has investment giants like Lightspeed Ventures and Khosla Ventures standing backing them. As a testament to their innovative product, Nutanix won a Best of VMworld 2011 award for their building block technology, even though it was only introduced in August 2011.
More information at the jump:
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we discussed the concept of value traps and showing value for money, 2 principles that are important when measuring the real value of IT. In this third installation, we will look at the virtuous circle, or virtuous cycle, of IT value that should direct your investment activities.
Virtuous Cycle
For those of you not familiar with the term, a virtuous cycle is when a single change or improvement leads to a cascading series of follow-on benefits which both reinforce themselves and add further momentum to the original change (a hyper “one good thing leads to another” scenario, if you will). Virtuous cycles are extremely rare to identify in business, and they are even harder to create. However, when they happen, they have profound implications.
To identify what IT investment activities make up a virtuous cycle, it’s worth exploring a number of the commonly cited IT and non-IT (aka “business”) tasks that are common in today’s enterprises – 18 to be specific. These were published in a research briefing by the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR):
| IT Tasks | Non-IT/Business Tasks |
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The research concluded that of the 18 common IT and non-IT tasks, only 4 have a statistically significant correlation to the business value (perceived) provided by IT. Now don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. All of these tasks are important, and effective leaders do well at most of these tasks. However, the other 14 tasks are enablers, not value generators. They focus on running IT and not improving the business. They have relatively little effect on business executives’ perception of business value. In short, they form the foundation of technology, skills, information, and credibility upon which you can produce and harvest value…but they are not value itself.
Those 4 elements, then, form the virtuous cycle of IT value. Once you’ve established value for money, it is more prudent to focus on identifying valuable business changes and getting a better return for each and every change. Does that mean that each of the elements are equally weighted? No. The most important element is effective oversight, and it involves having transparency into the investments being made and harvesting (or measuring) business benefits, or business value, from them.
At W&G, we work with each of our clients to help them achieve business value through technology adoption by employing these principles. You may find that your organization is better at doing needs identification and application development than BPR/organization change or oversight. Or you may not do any of these well at all. Our methodology can help you to increase business value by incrementally improving any of the steps. Even better, because of the dependencies that exist between them, you can achieve significant value by improving all of these elements in concert.
We start by understanding what matters most to your business…which business outcomes are important to business performance and focusing on them. In order to do this, we:
- Clarify the business strategy
- Analyze business processes and their impact to business outcomes
- Determine which key operational metrics that are or should be used to measure and track performance
Once we’ve gathered this information, we use what we’ve learned to develop opportunities for improvement to advance the strategy.
In the last and final installment, we’ll discuss how to find sources of new value.
Learn more: info@williamsgarcia.com