‘Delivering Maximum Business Value from IS Projects’
University College London, Gower St, London WC1E 6BT
Joint meeting of BCS North London Branch and BCS Project Management Specialist Group
Event review by Dalim Basu (Chairman, BCS North London Branch)
As an IS project manager everybody tells you that you need to align business and IT, but nobody tells you how! Organisations expend a vast amount of time, effort and money on Information Systems and yet achieve disappointingly modest levels of business value and benefits. Business people wonder why they so often fail to address business objectives. IT people wonder why business people keep changing their requirements – or don’t even know what they want in the first place.
Will any amount of IT be able to help?
DAVID JACOBS, Director of Profit from Information Ltd. was the presenter at the event.
“When people try to put business and technology together, they may find there’s no filling in the sandwich”, explained David.
To fill the gap, he introduced some concepts from his ‘Profit Business Value Approach™’ to the improvement of information systems business value and benefits.
David felt that an appreciation of the way that business uses information and that IT processes information goes a long way towards bridging the gap in terms of generation of value.
David defined ‘Information System Business Value’ (ISBV) as the degree to which an information system helps a business to achieve its objectives.
He described ‘IT effectiveness’ as “the degree to which a physical IT system supports the ISBV”.
To improve Business Value and Benefits, David advised considering ways to:
- formulate a way of working that may use information systems at strategic points, where beneficial;
- generate business value rather than ‘purely deploying software’;
