The Business Value of IT Optimizing Performance and Measuring Results

Establishing the cost and value relationship of IT for a business increasingly vexes Management. With the growth of information technology (IT) from a peripheral part of organizations’ internal systems infrastructure to its present central and dominant role in operations, there is an increasing need for Management to know the value of the expenditure in IT to the business’ overall operations.

How then can the significant and ever-growing cost of IT be expressed in terms that the business leaders may relate to and come to understand as investment and efficient operations rather than growing overhead? How can that equation be expressed in a language that the business leaders can understand?

The Business Value of IT knits this landscape together. It provides a reference for the full range of value, demonstrating and managing practices. Business value is just one output of the collection of processes through which businesses today try to maximize the age-old equation of profit equals revenue minus expenses. Business value is not identical to profit or revenue or expense. Rather “business value” is a multi-dimensional output and different observers apply different weights to different dimensions at different times.

Most businesses today rely on IT to realize some of their business value. It has been argued in recent years that IT may not provide as much value as it once did. But, in reality, “optimizing IT enhances business performance”.

RefineNetworks is here to provide business leaders from small to large enterprises with a set of yardsticks for measuring IT inputs and outputs in business processes and to provide solutions for transforming these measured IT inputs and outputs into business value metrics appropriate for the business enterprise.