Investing in Business Aligned IT

Demonstrating the benefits of an investment in IT infrastructure—both hardware and software—can be difficult in government organizations. As in other large organizations, managers must make a business case for any additions or improvements, which will be prioritized against all other requests for funding. This can for sure make a business able to run in a more resilient manner and in a more reliable manner for the outer good of its other stakeholders. 

Since there are many different ways to frame business cases, IT managers must choose the one that is most suitable for their specific organizational culture. This is as true among government organizations as it is for businesses. Aligning IT with other business priorities is essential. In the government sector, IT organizations have found success in articulating business cases using the concept of public value in the approach to building portfolios of projects and initiatives. 

Constructing a business case that demonstrates how infrastructure improvement leads to better productivity or improved service is a difficult process. Let's take a look at some solutions for defining and measuring the value behind IT infrastructure investments that are being adopted by real government IT organizations. A common complaint within IT organizations is that they receive too many requests from too many different business areas—and each request, of course, has a high degree of urgency. New initiatives tend to map to individual departmental regulatory requirements or mission priorities. These initiatives may appear to be a random assortment, but they are often closely aligned to the public value sought by a given department. Much of this comes back to the levels of IT support available and the manner to which key IT processes are able to run. 

There are several real issues with enterprise-wide IT investments. First, they have a more indirect and longer-lasting impact in terms of the public value benefits. These benefits are accrued, often unevenly, by different parts of the organization in ways that are not always easy to identify up front. In addition, the associated risks and costs are more readily perceived than the less readily visible and quantifiable public value. A business case should be based on how an infrastructure investment enables future investments as well as current activities. There are different ways in which to calculate this value, each with its own advantages and drawbacks, and each with a different degree of fitness for a particular organization's culture and maturity.