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’;

 I help businesses to gain optimal value and benefits from the use of IS/IT using skills I have acquired over 25 years

 Using The Profit Business Value Approach™, a whole new way of thinking about business value and IS/IT that I have developed, it is possible to increase value by 25, 50 or even 100%

 Firstly, I help to define the maximum possible value a business could gain from the use of IS/IT

 I then help to define the maximum proportion of such ‘theoretical’ value it would be practical to expect to achieve

 My clients do not need to stop using their existing methods as my Business Value Approach improves how existing methods are used and provides its own ‘missing links’

 You can hear more about how I do this at my free presentation and clinic called “Getting the Best for the Business from IS/IT; the Missing Links to Value”

 For more information please call me or email me

Please send any comments or ask any questions, either by commenting on a post or article - or email Profit from Information

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