NWC News Network, July 23 2008, 1230 hrs
Recently completed research from Unisys, involving 1,200 organizations worldwide, shows significant gaps between executives’ business and IT goals and their estimation of their organizations’ ability to achieve those objectives. Those gaps indicate that executives are not getting the most from their business initiatives and information technology (IT) investments, and need new approaches to modernize their business processes, strategic applications and IT infrastructures to address their core business challenges.
To help executives close those critical gaps, the company announced the Unisys Modernization Benchmark service. Using trend information from the research, this service helps organizations benchmark their current business and IT operations against those of their peers and competitors, exposing the gaps between their desired state and their current readiness to achieve it. This enables them to focus on those gaps which are likeliest to have a major impact and identify the business and technology initiatives in which they must invest – and the ways they must manage those investments – to gain the greatest business advantage in the shortest timeframe.
The double-blind study provides baseline information for the service. When asked to state their most important business objectives, the respondents to the Unisys study uniformly placed priority on customer-focused and customer-dependent goals, such as acquiring new customers, building closer relationships with existing customers, developing new products and services, growing sales and revenue and reaching new markets.
Those executive respondents identified 10 capabilities – nearly all dealing with information and IT investments – which they believed were critical to achieving those business objectives. The capabilities included ability to support innovation, IT management practices, strategic decision-making, and approach to IT investment, communications (information flow within and between organizations), IT sourcing model and IT security model.
The service is based on a workshop approach. The company’s consultants help clients measure the its capabilities in six dimensions which are business resilience – how an organization manages its processes, policies and systems, including IT, to provide security, privacy and business continuity, collaborative business – the availability and effectiveness of knowledge- and data-sharing within and between organizations and IT as a business enabler – how an organization views and manages IT – whether it treats it just as a cost center or as a strategic investment that can drive business innovation. The other three dimensions are open business and IT – an organization’s commitment to innovation and adaptability, including use of open standards and other technologies that enable suppliers and customers to access the organization’s systems and integrate theirs with it, green business – the efficient and ethical management and consumption of resources throughout the organization’s ecosystems, including suppliers and partners and business execution – the degree to which the organization’s management can execute business and technology initiatives to drive overall business objectives.
By comparing the organization’s capabilities and modernization progress in these critical areas to those of peers and competitors, as well as to industry and market averages, executives can re-evaluate the direction of their business and create a framework for where and how operations must evolve to take the organization where it needs to go.
The Unisys 3D Blueprinting approach can help clients execute their modernization plan. This approach enables them to gain visibility into the relationships between their business strategy, business processes, applications and IT infrastructure. Applying the 3D Blueprinting approach enables executives to create a plan for modernizing the enterprise from business strategy through infrastructure. Using the company’s modeling tools, the plan can be transformed into a high-impact solution to dramatically enhance the client’s chances for long-term success.
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