|
IT Value
Waagstein Research offers measurement and benchmark of IT value. An important goal of the measurement is to give increased understanding of how the organisation perform compared to other companies and organisations operating under similar conditions.
Background
For IT management and other decision-makers within an organisation it is of vital interest to know how well IT supports the business strategy and operations in their company. One important reason for this is to set a baseline for measuring performance improvements. However, it is also important to know how well the company performs compared to other companies in the same industry, in order to place the company’s own performance in a relevant context.
The measurement is designed to assess the business value of IT by measuring the business management’s satisfaction with the support of IT to business operations and strategy. It is not aimed at measuring the ROI or satisfaction with specific IT investments.
We not only analyse the general level of satisfaction with IT support to business operations and strategy, but we go deeper and analyse the various parts that together make up the total satisfaction. In this way the weak areas that cause the total satisfaction to be low can be identified, and thus targeted for remedial actions.
Scope
The study generates comparative data in several areas:
- IT strategy. Example: IT strategy support of the general business plan.
- IT systems. Example: The ability of the IT function to adapt IT systems rapidly to changes in the business.
- IT development process. Example: Ability of IT function to develop cost-efficient solutions.
- Communications. Example: Ability of IT management to understand business processes.
- Service level. Example: Attitude and service mindedness of IT personnel.
- Innovativeness. Example: Ability of the IT function to create innovative technical solutions to solve business problems.
- Focus on cost efficiency vs. support of business goals. Example: Current vs. desired focus according to business management.
- Competitiveness. Example: Present competitiveness and potential to improve competitiveness with IT.
Both satisfaction and importance are measured. This enables identification of weak areas that would need to be targeted for improvement as well as areas where support merely needs to be maintained at the same level or even possibly where support can be weakened without great decrease in overall satisfaction.
The results of the study are analysed, and based on this; individual recommendations are given to the participating companies/organisations.
The goal of the recommendations is to enables the company to prioritise investments and achieve higher IT value combined with maintained cost effectiveness.
Method
The data collection is conducted through a web survey with business management that have knowledge and a stake in the surveyed areas.
In order to secure the quality and relevance of the results the target for an industry specific study is to have five or more participating companies.
The participants are guaranteed anonymity. The participants know which companies participate in the study but are not given any information about each other’s individual results. No information from the study is distributed outside the group of participants. Each participant is supplied with an individually written report where their own results are compared with the average and extreme values.
| 
