Business’ Disappointment

At my client organization’s offices, while passing through, I overheard two ladies in the marketing team expressing their dissatisfaction with IT and the help desk in particular. I stopped and spoke with them a little bit about what was troubling them. What emerged was the usual lack of quality and support provided by IT for the applications that they use to perform their job functions.

What IT must always keep in the forefront of their minds is that they are ultimately servicing the business. If staff in business cannot access the applications that they require to perform their duties, then this will result in their incapability to bring in new business and increase sales volume. This, in turn, will lower the organization’s competitiveness and damage the brand image. Ultimately, this will result in lower profits and less resources available to all departments including IT.

I have always emphasized that IT is key in today’s times. Most other departments within the typical organization (Sales, Marketing, HR, Accounts etc.) are fairly mature. However, IT is relatively new in that processing information utilizing computers has only been going on for a few decades or so. Sales and marketing have, in their way, been occurring since the dawn of time. What this means is that, generally, IT has the greatest potential for improvement within the organization. A 10% improvement is usually quite easy to achieve in the IT department of most organizations, if not a much higher percentage. If an organization can improve their IT by that amount, it is obvious that they will surge ahead of the competition due to the efficiencies that will be inherent in this improvement to the entire organization. IT is, therefore, the most significant catalyst to an organization’s success nowadays.

It is easy for IT to pigeonhole itself inconstantly putting out fires and only focusing on meeting quarterly numbers. However, this is a short sighted strategy that will hinder the organization and ultimately hurt IT. Constant improvement is not a luxury but a necessity for all of us, especially IT.

A Case for the Business Case

Being in business requires making decisions based on what makes the most sense and is most aligned to the organizations goals and objectives among the choices available. For each decision, various alternatives will typically exist and different paths or avenues will be available that could be followed with their specific pros and cons. To make sense out of this situation and to work out the correct decision requires the implementation of Business Cases.

A Business Case is a decision making tool that captures the reasoning behind initiating a project or task and the effect it will ultimately have on profitability. The financial impact of spending money is analyzed including the rate of return, cash flow, length of payback period and other financial criteria as appropriate.

Very often, the decision making is performed far too informally with top management, making snap decisions base don their past experiences. While past experiences of senior personnel is a valuable input, a formal business case analysis that includes background analysis of the project, expected business benefits, options considered and the reasons for accepting or rejecting the options, expected costs to be incurred, gap analysis and potential risks is a far superior technique of decision making that results in far more mature and responsible decisions being made that are in better alignment with organizational strategy and goals.

The benefits of proper business case analysis and implementation are:

• Proper Investment decisions are made with fewer budget shortfalls during the course of the project


• Proper understanding of the scope of the project resulting in adequate resource allocation and schedule expectations which in turn leads to superior project management


• Correct decisions made on whether to take on the project or not due to a good understanding of the project requirements and the organization’s capabilities to meet those requirements.


• Proper prioritization of projects


• Good understanding of inter-dependencies within projects and the rest of the environment so that fewer unexpected errors occur.

Ultimately the implementation of business cases should bring about a change in epistemology within the organization that causes all personnel (from the lowest to the highest) to think in terms of the benefits to the organization and comparison of alternatives based on alignment with organizational objectives for each decision.

It is only when all the members of an organization make decision (large or small) with a systematic, structured decision making process that the organization’s decision making will be fully optimized and the organization will reap the benefits presented above. If top management consider themselves above the need to perform business case analysis, the organization will pay the price for their arrogance with problems and issues that are caused by poorly thought out decisions.