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“Where do I start?” is a frequent question. “With the
business need,” is our first answer. The need is to understand customers,
partners and competitors, and then what is needed to be a great company that
earns great returns by serving real needs.
The ValueBridge Advisors approach focuses on the intersection of business effectiveness, technology economics and decision making to drive risk-return value. Thus, our more detailed answer to the “Where do I start?” question is based on those focus areas. We're ready to assist through problem-solving workshops that are economical and accelerate benefits, and through executive mentoring. We hope you will reach out to us before the crisis arises. It’s easier to keep someone alive by early recognition of the heart attack warning signs.
Business Effectiveness Improve business-IT value realization metrics. Organizations often struggle to "see the value." Often metrics are aligned to excessively tactical or strategic intermediate metrics. It’s no surprise that benefits don’t meet expectations. This evaluates how well metrics are tied back to competitive objectives. It also evaluates how well metrics are tied back to investment portfolio categories, avoiding another error that frequently hurts value. Improve strategy to business-technology portfolio alignment to competitive strategy. CIOs often cannot get the benefits of typical portfolio approaches because they are difficult to tailor. This evaluates two points 1) whether the business-technology portfolio categories are appropriate for the business strategy and 2) whether the right projects flow into the portfolio to drive risk-return value. The quick hit benefits are improved alignment around the right criteria and improvement in portfolio value, especially in time-sizing projects to get better business benefit. Technology Economics Cost structure evaluation. IT has largely missed the decades of analysis that went into cost structures for the productive engines of enterprises that build products to create revenue. IT still budgets more like a support function. This evaluation looks for quick hit benefits by determining whether business line plans are really tied to IT over time --- a cost structure, flexibility, scalability -- not just a period budget. Bringing these into alignment can increase competitive strength to help seize new opportunity in this recovery economy. Job Saving Analysis. For many years, off-shoring risk and other concerns fostered techniques to improve business outcomes and avoid job loss. Sadly, these techniques to avoid risk and loss have been little used in the current crisis. Thus, unnecessary damage was done to enterprises. People who could be doing valuable work to serve customers, fight competitive battles, seize business opportunity and grow revenue, are instead out of a job as a company struggles to support sluggish processes. This evaluation compares organizations to best practices and looks for opportunities to save cost and gain speed – without cutting people unnecessarily. Decision Making. Histories of failed companies are humbling. While participants maintained that “bad stuff just happened,” the sad reality is that most business failures where from bad decisions made in the face of sufficient information to make better decisions. Measure and improve alignment and decision making (governance) health. Organizations still struggle with quality and speed of decision-making, even though there is good insight on criteria for healthy governance. This is designed to put the pendulum in the right place. Some enterprises suffer from slow and ponderous decision-making. Others suffer from “shoot from the hip” decisions that end up as “shot in the foot” decisions. The quick hit benefit is a comparison against four criteria for efficient and effective governance that drive more risk-return aware decisions. Importantly, it helps CIOs become more effective in partnering with business leaders to measure and improve decision making. Shift risk assessment to better business focus and more powerful insight. The c-suite is concerned about the cost/benefit of risk assessment and better detection of risk in "dark corners." Poor risk assessment distracts from effective fixing. How can leaders more easily shift to risk management that both drives better business decisions and is more efficient? This risk-return assessment can be made at three levels: business-technology investment portfolio, program/project management and operational/service delivery. It can also be made a various levels of depth. For quick benefit, it starts with a combination of existing information on risks and on “dark corners” where the organization doesn’t have good ability to detect problems. These problem-solving workshops are different because they are:
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