The world spends almost a trillion dollars a year on IT, an eight-fold increase in just a decade. Yet the function tasked with managing this enormous investment fund often suffers from the lowest internal satisfaction rating of any organizational unit. In this briefing we consider how ‘Creating Value from Corporate IT’ can be achieved through applying best practice approaches in strategy, process, organization and measurement to the IT function.

For many organizations building an IT function that has the focus, agility and capability to truly enable the business to achieve its goals is not a short journey. And for any journey to be traversed successfully a route map is required. Building that route map is a critical process, not only because it provides the framework to align effort towards the prize once completed, but also because it enables the other key Executives in the business to participate in a manner which enables both their buy-in and increases their understanding of the role of IT in the modern corporation.

Wherever you are in the process of building an IT function that can serve the needs of the modern corporation in this increasingly technology-enabled world, there should be three over-riding principles guiding the path forward. First, create absolute alignment between the aspiration of the business, and the strategy for IT. Second, build an IT organization with the structure and competence to deliver that strategy. And third, put in place a fully cascaded measurement system that can link strategic goals to real-time system delivery.

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This article is part of Axon's IS Strategy Process.  To view other articles in this process please visit the IS Strategy page