Business Intelligence Applied: Implementing an Effective Information and Communications Technology Infrastructure

Conclusion

ICT projects must be managed as investments in the organization and support its competitive positioning. Organizations must know how they manage their portfolio of projects and what to do when projects do not deliver as planned. There is no cookbook approach to value management or getting your organization to realize a return on its investment in ICT. Each project must be approached from a predefined investment management standpoint where the organization knows what it expects from its investments before funding them and has processes in place to ensure that the ICT projects continue to provide a return.

It is essential that today's competitively minded organization be prepared to take a high-level view of ICT and the organization, its business processes, its products, and the technologies needed to support its competitive positioning. Managers do not necessarily need to understand all of the subtle nuances of hardware and software, but they must understand the linkage among business strategy, ICT infrastructure, and organizational success in order to be a positive part of the team that drives strategic discussions within an enterprise. Hardware engineers are frequently making the decisions today about which technologies to use, whereas the business analyst —the person in the organization who is performing the analysis of ICT alternatives, whether the CTO, CIO, CKO, CMO, project manager, or business analyst—is ensuring that all the technologies fit together to support ...