Infrastructure Benefit Types

Much of the work I am doing involves estimating the benefits from infrastructure technology, this is not a straightforward task given that most of infrastructure is invisible to the end user (and it should be!). There are many way of attempting this, some more complicated then others (usually requiring military grade spreadsheets!), but for me keeping this simple is the key.

I have created a set of what I call “Benefit Pillars”. These are the types or classes of benefits that you can expect from an investment in IT infrastructure.

Here they are:

Risk – how can this investment help an organisation to improve the way specific risks can be managed or mitigated?
Cost – how can this investment help an organisation to avoid or offset specific costs? useful to include time-frames and monetary values where possible since this is primarily an economic indicator.
Functionality -  how can this investment help an organisation to improve the functionality of an existing capability or initiative? useful to give examples of how this improvement will improve usability of a user application and improve end user experience & effectiveness through improved functionality.
Service Delivery – how can this investment help an organisation to improve the way it delivers service both from an IT perspective and from a business perspective?

 

How do CIOs track benefits enabled by IT?

A concern I am hearing a lot today is how a CIO should go about attributing benefits realised by the business back to the IT initiatives that enabled them in the first place.

 

IT costs are usually tracked in the IT organisation’s budget while the benefits from IT enabled change are usually realised (and reported) in the business units of an organisation (P&L).

 

This issue is particularly challenging for the largely “intangible” infrastructure capabilities such as collaboration technology.

 

Mature benefits management disciplines are needed in IT to help create the mapping between IT enabled “potential” benefits to business realised “actual” benefits.

 

The simple example below shows a benefits map for Software Asset Management: