Leaders are consistently charged with developing winning strategies and making high stakes decisions, but most are unaware of the impact of their technology related decision that often undermine required information for decision making and critical reasoning.
By identifying the most common biases, pitfalls and distortions in strategic decision making and critical reasoning along with the preventative and proactive measures associated with making strategic decisions, you will be equipped to successfully address high-stakes business challenges.
All business decisions have financial impact on your organization. All business leaders understand that any wrong decision will result in high cost in both time and money. Decision making and the nature of decisions themselves are changing with the introduction of new information technology. The use of IT systems relates to and can induce changes in business processes within firms as well as interorganizational project processes between firms. Decision making is one of essential management tasks. Effective decision making is informed decision making
Consider following:
- Are You Asking the right Questions?
- Are you getting information from trusted source with options for critical decision?
- Are your getting business information or technical information? You will need to bridge gap to base your decisions.
- Do you have industry benchmarks for your analysis? How about cross industries (type/size) & geographies?
Operational Decision: Your IT Department is faced with 100s of decisions every day. This type of decision is essential to every organization, no matter what size, because of how often they are made. When taken individually, their value isn’t as high as the other decisions because it usually involves a single transaction or customer. But when gathered, this data becomes extremely valuable. When you consider a decision that’s been made thousands of times a year, its value increases and often exceeds that of the other types of decisions.
Consider following items:
- Are you making decisions based on data from earlier decisions?
- Are your decisions reducing soft cost? By what percentage daily, weekly and monthly?
- What decisions required to remove repetitive tasks?
Recording data on your daily and weekly decision, will provide opportunities to assess decisions and outcome. Hence, options for continues improvements.
IT Strategy, Roadmaps, Budget: Businesses depend on planning and making decisions to grow and thrive. A dynamic strategic plan evolves as initiatives are executed and feedback informs decisions about viable strategies. Planning becomes a continuous exercise where updates are based on what’s happening now, not last month or last quarter.
When you think about how best to achieve a strategic objective, there are countless options and potential outcomes. You need to choose initiatives that will return the most value. That means creating multiple scenarios, performing what-if analyses and comparing trade-offs in time, cost, risk, margin, value, capacity, competitiveness and other factors.
Consider following:
- Does your IT Strategy decision align business strategy?
- Do you have on going process of testing data to base your decisions?
- Do you have documented business & technology gap analysis to make your decision?
- Have you considered all the business impact and soft cost for IT Budget and roadmap?
- Do you have plans and schedule for IT Strategy execution? How about measuring success/failure process?
IT strategy without accurate data and not aligned with business strategy will have financial consequences. And IT Strategy without ongoing process to update your roadmap and budget will not deliver expected results.
Partnership: Most organization don’t have means get all the required critical information for their decision-making process. It’s significant investment to setup your business to have required information for both operation and strategy decision. A trusted partner can assist you to setup your business to an access to all of the above information.
Consider following while selecting a trusted partner:
- An in-depth view of your business, people and culture;
- Ongoing Best Practices Benchmarking: Scoring your Business IT against industry standards;
- Identification of Technology Risks and defining the business impact;
- Focus on sequencing high priorities that solve business risks;
- Prioritization of IT initiatives that support your business initiatives.
Need help? Take action
Partner with Encompass – contact our team
Also review – Impact on Revenue blog
Understanding cost – access cost calculator
