Setting the Table for 2016 Planning: Save Money + Time With a Seat for IT
As the year draws to a close, most of us can’t help but start looking ahead to 2016. Businesses are no different. This is the time of year when leaders from across the organization gather around the table to share what they’ve seen, what they expect to come, and how to best position the company for future success. To make sure your company has a clear path to success in the new year, make sure IT has a seat at that table.
Business leaders are prioritizing key technology initiatives such as data management and analytics, moving to the cloud, and evolving business platforms as mission critical. The most successful CIOs will come to the table with a perspective that falls into three main areas:
PLATFORMS
In their recent report Building the Digital Platform: Insights From the 2016 Gartner CIO Agenda Report, Gartner describes the important and emerging trend of CIOs shifting the perspective on how their organizations view the tools and systems they utilize. “To succeed, CIOs must rethink and retool their approach to all the layers of their business’s platform, not just the technical one.”
From this perspective, the view of an organization’s business platform spans not only the internal systems typically managed by the IT team, but also those external tools that interact with them. Correctly aligning these tools and systems into a comprehensive enterprise architecture plan can help ensure business goals and technology are tightly aligned.
DATA
While managing the collection of systems and tools used by your organization can be challenging, accessing all the data within them can seem downright impossible. For many, the dream of accessing truly actionable data seems fleeting at best. But with a well-designed business platform, this doesn’t need to be the case.
Many complimentary technology products are pre-configured to integrate with one another. For example, a platform including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, ClickDimensions marketing automation and Microsoft Business Intelligence is well suited to produce clear, actionable data for use within your organization. Aligning these products correctly in the setup phase is critical, but if done right the benefits can be far reaching.
INNOVATION
Both a constant opportunity and challenge, most organizations look to the CIO as the driver of innovation. But as discussed in a previous blog post, without a clear plan and structure in place to manage and maintain your existing applications, you’ll never have the freedom or flexibility to focus on innovation. But with a well designed platform that facilitates the clean and clear transition of data, IT resources can focus on what’s needed next rather than getting bogged down with what’s screaming for attention now.
As we prepare for the end of 2015 and look ahead to 2016, business leaders have a number of obstacles to overcome. But those who tightly align IT with business objectives are the ones who will realize business success. To see how Tricension can help your organization with end-of-year reporting and strategic planning for 2016, contact us today.
