Optimise your personal IT value chain

David M Williams
Friday, 15 July 2011 00:02

Opinion and Analysis

You may not have considered it, but much of IT - from ad-hoc help-desk support to large-scale projects - follows a similar value chain. Understanding your value chain is a first step to enhancing your own productivity and performance.

 

 

Let me take the sense of 'buzz word'-iness out of this: a 'value chain' is how an individual or a department or a business adds value by the work it performs. Resellers may speak of their 'value add', meaning what they've done to a raw product to justify the mark-up they charge.

You might not think of yourself or your IT department as performing a value-added service but if you are an up-and-coming IT professional, or even a new IT Manager or CIO, I want you to take up a new way of thinking.

I'm not advocating magical 'positive thinking' by any means. This is strictly a pragmatic and realistic viewpoint about what a corporate IT department should be.

In fact, let me blunt: if your IT department is there purely 'to keep the lights on' or 'to make e-mail work' and measure your success in terms of whether files are backed up or not then you are not actually doing anything special.

In reality, the provision of basic computing services like these is so fundamental to modern business that it is just plain expected of any IT team. If you cite these items as an achievement or a strategic focus then your department is misguided and is misaligned with the objectives of the rest of the business. If your IT team only provide these functions then it may as well be outsourced, because these functions have become a commodity.

Let me tell you my view of a contemporary IT department's function.