¶ … Communicating the Value of IT
Although technology's importance is acknowledged in most organizational rhetoric, this does not discount the need for members of Informational Technology departments to communicate the particular vitality and integrity of IT to their specific organization's mission, values, and goals. Also, specific IT projects and investments must have a clear relationship to the development of organizational short-term as well as long-term goals.
Thus, to show such a correlation between the aims of the IT department and the larger organizational mission and state of the organization's financial and creative health, IT personnel must speak in a language that other department managers can understand in terms of cost benefit analysis and marketing. The proposed IT systems must not simply work as systems; they must also work for the overall organizational mission within a budget, and produce a substantial return on firm investments.
For instance, say an IT department wishes to overhaul the particular informational infrastructure of a company. When presenting this notion...
It might be noted in such a presentation that these new investments in IT infrastructure would not only facilitate connectivity, systems integration, and data storage used by multiple applications, but also that developing such cutting-edge and uniquely flexible IT infrastructures could be a source of competitive advantage against firms that did not make a similar investment at this critical juncture. (Kumar, 2004)
Some firms, by design, require more persuasion about the use of technology than others. The level of persuasion required depends on the comfort of the rest of the staff with technology, the youth or age of higher-level management not directly affiliated with IT, and also the nature of the organization. For instance, information technology's importance is usually acknowledged as critical for firms…
