Author: Barb Dossetter, Delivery Director CIO Connect

The hardest thing about summer is that it must end. Even though August is not finished, and we are a week away from the Bank Holiday, there was a decidedly autumnal look to the mists this weekend. As we come back to work, we are faced with a couple of key activities.

Planning and budgeting for 2011

What are we going to achieve for the remainder of 2010?

Many of our organisations are going to scramble to get the best second half they can, in what might be difficult or at least uncertain circumstances. How are we going to help them to achieve the best that they can? Not wanting to sound all autumnal and downbeat about this, but it could be a tremendous opportunity for those IT Leaders who have had difficulty in the past with their organisations understanding the value of IT to step up and demonstrate some value. I’m a great believer in grabbing opportunities, or trying to turn a difficulty into an opportunity. Lemons and lemonade!

So, on both topics – budgeting for next year, and the completion of this year on the best note possible, it’s a great opportunity to schedule a face to face meeting with your counterparts. And don’t go empty handed, go with some ideas. Here’s my lemonade recipe.

• Take a list of business leaders
• Work out what are the key wins for them, or what are the kpi’s they are individually measured on – such as improved product delivery times, better complaints handling
• Look at your organisation and see where there are any improvements or efficiencies that play into those key wins – faster, cheaper, better business processes for example
• Look at the capacity within IT such as unused functionality in applications, or functionality that can be added quickly and cheaply
• Match to see if there are any easy opportunities
• Schedule a meeting with the business leader and sell him or her by pointing out the opportunities to their part of the business of this approach – answer the ‘what’s in it for me’ question – but not in so many words
• Deliver
• Note the savings for the organisation, even if the cost of IT went up, as part of your budget presentation to underline the value of IT to the business

Our business partners have been saying for a long time that they want us to be more innovative, so we should be pushing at an open door, provided we bring a glass of lemonade with us.

Tags: Barb's Blog, Budget, CIO, Innovation, IT Leaders, Opportunity