The IT Skeptic - value

Customer value

skeptic — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:03:27 +0000

The cult of the customer keeps popping up to annoy me. Yesterday I posted about how being customer-centric doesn't mean spending all our time with the customer, about how it's important to spend most of our time inside the factory, delivering. Today I want to talk about "customer value" and how it isn't the Holy Grail of IT. We as organisations don't exist for our customers. We exist for the continuance of the organisation, Click to tweet We exist to maximise value for the organisation, whether it be commercial, public or non-profit. It's not anti-customer to realise they are not the be-all and end-all of our existence.

The goal of our activities should be to maximise value for our organisation. That value is defined by the owners and governors of the organisation not the customers.

The measurement of value is of course different for every organisation. Customer value is not one such metric. Stop foaming: let me explain.

McKinsey on how CIOs should think about business value

skeptic — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:52:28 +0000

For those who can afford $150 annual subscription this McKinsey article looks useful: How CIOs should think about business value.

(Incidentally you will get at least as much value for your money from a McKinsey premium subscription as you will by paying TWENTY FIVE times that much for ITIL Live. Makes an interesting comparison doesn't it?)

For those who are skint like me McKinsey kindly give a lot away from their teasers:

Do you need to do ITIL? Wrong question

skeptic — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:14:37 +0000

We can do without all this angst about "Should we do ITIL?" That is the last question we should ask ourselves.

Considering ITIL? Ignore ROI that other organisations have achieved

skeptic — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:49:07 +0000

Research on ITIL ROI would be a useful thing for the general information of the industry, but if you are considering whether or not to adopt ITIL, any ROI information you can find now is useless.

ITIL business case: find the money

skeptic — Sun, 11 May 2008 09:46:03 +0000

There is much discussion of which processes to start with in ITIL, or what order to do them in, or whether to do them at all, or how to decide. If the decision on which processes to reengineer is driven by a business case then the right ones will be chosen: those where ITIL will yield a return to the business.
FTM: Find The Money.

When you don't run IT - The IT Skeptic

skeptic — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 08:29:08 +0000

4:54 minutes (1.97 MB)

This is a podcast of the original article: "When you don't run IT as a business, the inevitable results: bad business decisions".

Busines cases are so simple: give the decisionmaker what they want

skeptic — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 05:40:41 +0000

When you are building a business case for ITIL (or anything), it doesn't matter if it is intangible Value or $$$Return that the proposal is offering if that is not what the business wants at this time.

When you don't run IT as a business, the inevitable results: bad business decisions.

skeptic — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 22:58:29 +0000

This article has been podcast

An insightful remark at the IT Managment Forum set off today's train of thought:

Many ITIL projects are overcapitalised renovations

skeptic — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 10:05:27 +0000

I have been discussing ITIL ROI with the Spanish ITIL community, via Antonio Valle's blog with the magnificent name "Gobierno de las TIC. Conocimiento Adquirido". I was asked the question “How is the relationship between an architectural project and a house?”.

Unless one is setting up a data centre from scratch, I don't think the architect analogy fits. An ITIL adoption is usually more like renovations.

If IT ain’t broke don’t fix it.

skeptic — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 10:31:14 +0000

This article has been podcast

Perhaps the saddest sight in the ITIL world is organisations that adopt ITIL processes when the old ones were working OK. Don’t tell me it doesn’t happen.

The Emperor has no clothes. Where is the evidence for ITIL?

skeptic — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 07:08:00 +0000

This article has been podcast

Since this is a skeptical blog, it is high time we examined the evidence. Where is the evidence for the benefits of ITIL? There isn’t any. Not the kind of hard empirical evidence that would stand up in, say, clinical trials. There is more evidence for quack alternative medicines than there is for ITIL.