E-Business Management Services

E-Business Management Services

CEOs & CIOs - Can They Get Along? (To Leverage the Power of IT to Maximize Business Performance!

While information technology (IT) continues to be the dominate business resource in gaining a competitive advantage, increasing operations efficiency and maximizing profit margins, CEOs, for the most part remain "IT Challenged" (with limited knowledge of the value of contemporary IT assets in the delivery of business performance), and CIOs and other IT professional lack the knowledge of the key business principles that would make their expertise ultimately valuable to the company.

Why is there a barrier between business managers and IT professionals? The differences between these two roles can be traced to the differences in the personality traits that tend to characterize individuals who elect to pursue a career as a business management when compared to those of the IT professional.

The business manager role attracts a personality that is extraverted, outgoing, competitive, gregarious, desirous of challenges requiring leadership, social, focused on the macrocosm and satisfied by organizational goal attainment and public recognition.

The IT professional’s personality traits are almost the opposite. They tend to be introverted, introspective, focused microcosmatic challenges, somewhat anti-social and satisfied by the accomplishment of isolated tasks and the creative challenges associated with code development and IT problem solving. Satisfaction for IT professionals is gained in mastering the task and being recognized by the narrow sphere of IT peers.

Based on this simple analysis it is clear that business managers and IT professionals share little in common making it understandable that they have trouble focusing on the common agenda of the business enterprise and its financial health and profitability.

Ironically, the challenge facing most businesses today is finding a strategy to integrate the value of these two personalities into a business professional that manifests both the expertise in the business principles essential to quality business management and the solid working knowledge of the value of the range of IT resources that can optimize business performance.

The barrier that separates business management and the IT professional has been the major factor in slowing the integration of valuable IT assets into the strategic business plans of today’s companies.

Business executives, primarily those with P&L responsibility, leadership and decision making authority, must address this issue.

Leadership at this level is first justified by the inevitability of IT as the most important resource in maximizing business performance. This being true, the sooner top executives recognize the need for understanding the value of IT assets in business terms, the more quickly they will be able to capitalize on the benefits that can produce a competitive advantage, operating efficiencies and optimum profit margins.

Once this acknowledgement is made, P&L level executives can adopt business policies that direct decision making based on criteria that ensure business value based on standards, interoperability, scalability, IT life cycle data and ROI impact.

The first role of EBMC E-Business Management Consulting to its clients is to assist P&L level decision makers in recognizing the impact potential of IT assets on business performance and providing them with a decision making methodology that will guarantee management by objective (MBO) and return on investment (ROI) impact.

For more information visit http://www.e-businessmanagement.com or contact E-BMC at john.whiting@e-businessmanagement.com.

Dr. John T. Whiting, Managing Director
john.whiting@e-businessmanagement.com