Assessing and Communicating the Value of Information Technology (IT)

¶ … 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 to the rest of the firm, it is important that IT personnel demonstrate some form of quantitative measurement regarding the proven eventual rewards to the firm from improving the IT infrastructure, as well as simply clarifying the specifics of the new design of the infrastructure itself for laypersons. 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 that already deploy a great deal of funds towards e-business and e-commerce. In such firms, by conception and initial design, IT has always constituted a major portion of corporate investments. In other firms that are older and less technical, these organizations may demand more evidence regarding the value of IT, the development of new infrastructures, and the overall defense of the funds allotted to the IT department.

In defense of such an attitude, it might be added that improvements in specific IT infrastructures for some firms are often described as anecdotal, rather than quantitatively measured. Large financial investments in IT infrastructures have often proven difficult to justify, depending upon the nature of the firm. (Kumar, 2004) Some of this lack of immediate return upon investment can be attributed to some of the reasons organizations are unwilling to invest in IT in the first place, such as fear of change and a fear of the unknown. But it is not enough for IT personnel merely to despair about such technophobia, rather it is vital to the organizational mission and survival of the IT department that both technical staff and technophobic management personnel understand one another's worldviews and vocabularies and strive to broach gaps in education and aims.