Running IT Like A Business

Beneath the Buzz: IT Strategy

IT strategy can be harmful to your health! What? Yes, if done wrong. Here’s how to approach strategy with your eyes open.

Beneath the Buzz: Governance

Does governance mean ethics? control? resource allocation? something else? It could be all of the aboveit can all be handled by a systemic approach.

Beneath the Buzz: Shared Services

By sharing a centralized IT group, business units gain many advantages. Easy? No. Worth it? Yes.

Beneath the Buzz: SLAs

Service level agreements are fundamental to the integrity of IT.

IT As a Business Profiler

With this tool, you can input your specific goal for running IT like a business and, based on the data, we’ll compute a profile of the practices optimized for achieving that benefit.

How to Run IT Like a Business

Evolving from a cost center, IT is taking on the character, rigor and practices of a business within a business. It won’t be easy, but for CIOs it’s a matter of survival.

IT’s Secret Weapon: Internal Marketing

It’s the best-kept secret for success: Marketing IT’s achievements will boost credibility, bring transparency and perhaps win approval for $2 million projects in under a minute.

IT Incorporated

USAA rebuilt IT as a for-profit subsidiary, turning IT services in products and IT employees into product managers. The dividends have been great for IT and even better for business.

The Best Best Practices

The basic building blocks of running IT like a business, as revealed by CIO research.

The Rest of the Best

Highlights of the data compiled from more than 100 respondents to CIO‘s survey “How to Run IT Like a Business.”

Washington State’s Department of Infomation Services.

Washington State’s Department of Infomation Services operates like a business that sells IT products and services to state agencies. The format is that of a mall — the Techmall, to be precise. Check out the Techmall, their rate card and online catalog.

The IT Business Reading List

Though still relatively rare, internal IT catalogs that list services and products available to the enterprise are perhaps the best vehicle for achieving cost transparency and reinforcing IT as a business within a business.