Technology spending is becoming more complex. There’s also a trend toward business units making decisions about which technology they need and choosing the vendors they want. Where does this leave the CIO and the IT organization? Do you feel shoved aside? Do business-user decisions leave your IT group in chaos in the wake of their purchasing decision as you try to keep everything patched together and supported? How can you regain your rightful seat at the Head Table and participate in decisions that drive the organization’s IT decisions versus your IT team being driven by the business users?
We will, in this blog, give our views on how the CIO can return to his/her rightful place at the Head Table where decisions are being made and resources are being allocated. We believe that it is all about enabling business to feel more control and ensuring they derive the value that they know technology can give them. As a CIO, you can equip the business users of your organization with a business management platform with the right abilities to meet their varied needs. Here are the five “abilities” that our business customers at Corporater tell us that they desire from their technology to enable them to better manager their business functions:
1. Applicability
While business users typically define their needs as limited to their specific functional domain, they do see the value of buying a platform/solution that is not limited to a specific business domain but can also be used across multiple business domains within your organization. Key questions to ask are: How wide is the platform? Can it link strategy, finance, portfolio, quality, governance, risk, compliance, sales, operations and support the various business frameworks that your internal customers use? Corporater Business Management Platform is a business management orchestration platform that allows you to configure domain-specific functionality that is unique to your organization and ensure that corporate strategy is the ‘glue’ that binds it all together.
2. Configurability
You have seen the progression over time. From coding to low coding to no coding. Is the platform you are offering business a configurable platform that has ‘built in’ functionality for customization? Users will need customization – but can you achieve customization in a configurable platform without any coding? With Corporater Business Management Platform, business users can configure their own solutions to better match their own needs and processes, thereby improving acceptance of the implementation while making the business users feel more empowered. A bonus to this that this will relieve the IT organization to perform more strategic work.
3. Manageability
Most business management tools do not support a full management process. BI platforms focus on analyzing data. Planning solutions focuses on planning. But what about execution? What business needs is a platform that contains these three important processes – analytics, planning, and execution – in one unified platform.
4. Adaptability
Any business application will need to adapt to your unique business. Even if things are 99% standard across your organization, the pesky 1% that deviates will make life messy for you and for your business users. You would typically choose one of two ways to deal with the deviations: 1) compromise on how the system reflects the deviation, or 2) create an expensive workaround. We have solved the “problem of exceptions” in our Business Management Platform. We know that deviations are to be expected for every business – that’s why we purposefully developed a modelling tool for easily handling deviations.
5. Capability
The bottom line is that users seek to buy business management applications to meet their functionality needs. How desirable they perceive a platform will depend on how well its capabilities meet their desired functionality. We have 250 business capabilities – developed by request of our business management clients over the last 17 years. Functionality in the categories of business frameworks, measuring, collecting, assessing, approving, analyzing, publishing, communicating, automating, collaborating, and calculating…just to name a few. See the various solutions to see the capability of Corporater Business Management Platform.
I wish you good luck in returning to your rightful position as Head of the Table when it comes to making technology decisions in your organization. Check out the Corporater Business Management Platform and see what our happy business customers have to say about us.
