Measuring IT's Value

What complicates this question is a lack of tools for measuring whether a particular IT investment is having a substantial impact on the business. Many investments made in multimillion-dollar IT projects were driven by blind faith. Sadly, the majority proved to be fairly mediocre investments, and many are now seen as a standard cost of doing business rather than as a tool for gaining a competitive edge.

The primary reason for this is tied to the industry's dirty little secret about enterprise applications. The simple truth is that enterprise applications are a way of codifying a business process in software. That sounds great until you realize that the software is completely inflexible, which means the corporation is forced to bend to specific business processes that the software understands. In the real world, business processes are made up of people and therefore have a tendency to change and evolve.

Corporations are desperate for help when it comes to getting value out of their existing IT investments. The people best suited to helping them accomplish that goal are the technology experts that make up the channel. Beyond that, corporations want a real competitive edge from IT. They need enterprise software to bend to the business, not vice versa, and the next generation of these applications will be defined more by their ability to deliver a flexible business process integration architecture than by any other metric. Again, only the channel players will have the business and technology skills to effectively deploy these applications.

The real challenge for the channel in the short term is to fix the immediate issue that was created by overpromising and underdelivering on technology. Once that is accomplished, we can finally get back to the real job at hand: true business and economic innovation driven by technology.

What's your view? I can be reached at (650) 513-4227 or via e-mail at [email protected].