Did Somebody Say Strategy?

How do you prioritize your IT portfolio of initiatives in this economy?

If you’re like most enterprises, you have a backlog of IT initiatives lined-up on the heels of your work-in-progress.  You may also have some new pressure to take a harder look at costs and potentially trim or re-prioritize your WIP and your backlog.

So how do you decide what stays and what gets put on hold (or cancelled)?  And for what stays, how do you re-order your efforts to make sure IT is delivering the best return on investment?

As we mention here, ROI (including TCO) analysis is a good acid test for IT projects, but it’s not the only ingredient nor the primary consideration for green-lighting or keeping an initiative – especially a Strategic Systems initiative (one that will give you a competitive advantage in the market).

Here are some of those other ingredients that you should use:

A Tribute to Dick Antalek

One of my mentors from Hyperion days passed away yesterday.
Dick Antalek was the CIO when I first joined in 1999.

He was a remarkable man: patient, insightful, experienced, and humble.  I remember he came into my office one day to talk about methodologies for driving out business system requirements.  I showed him a couple I had been working on and learning (one of them developed by Simon Tucker).  I started walking him through the Zachman Framework like I knew what I was talking about, and he looks up and says “yeah, it’s pretty complete, isn’t it?  I worked with John Zachman at IBM when he came out with this…..”  So Dick had been WAY around the I.T. block before I even put fingers to a TRS-80 or Commodore PET.

He was never too busy to take a call or e-mail from me, and gave me great advice around learning business and the business use of technology.  He got me started on learning to connect financial statements with business systems (“it’s great that you’re measuring call center volume, but what’s the impact on the P&L?”)

He took me to lunch at a Thai restaurant in Old Town Alexandria, VA, one day.  We both ordered our food “Thai” spicy (as opposed to “American” spicy).  He didn’t make me feel embarrassed when I started choking and coughing on the spices: he just regaled me with stories of his visits to Thailand.

Dick was a great man, he will be missed by many, including me.

3 new links on EPM strategy

I came across these three links today (all from vendors) that address Enterprise Performance Management and strategy:

1. Where does SAP Strategy Management (SSM) fit?  A blog posting from Mike Bettencourt, SAP Product Manager, on how the Pilot Software acquisition fits into SAP's offerings.  He talks about aligning your strategy, with metrics and EPM initiatives.

Invest our way through the downturn using EPM

As we said in our January 31st blog entry, the automatic response of most boards, executives and managers in a down economy is Cost Reduction, Cost Removal, Cost Avoidance, Cost Containment, Cost Management and Price Reductions!

While it’s never a bad idea to manage your costs, it’s not great to do it at the expense of the rest of your business.  And why do we automatically drop our prices and lay-off staff?  Are we doing this because our competition is doing it, or do we know for a fact that these are the most effective decisions to make?  Are we sacrificing long-term, sustainable success with short-term actions?

One of the promises of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is in the rigorous, multidimensional connecting of the half of the business that asks, “What should we do and how should we do it?” with the other half that asks, “How are we doing and why?”

EPM may even help your company to emerge from a weak economy even better than before.  Some companies do worse coming out of a downturn than they do going in to one: a recent Bain study found that of the firms that made major gains in revenue or profitability during the last recession, more than 70% sustained those gains through the next boom cycle. The corollary was also true: fewer than 30% of those that lost ground were able to regain their positions.  When you only cut costs when going into a downturn, you may be ill equipped to come out of one successfully.  And typically we come out of them faster than we go in.

Here are some ways that EPM can help you manage into, through, and out of a down economy: