Ashley Bard, AdventHealth, IT Director, Enterprise Care Navigation and Telehealth Technologies
- A centralized view of IT projects, for example in a service management
dashboard, can help IT better align with business priorities. - IT leaders can also leverage the data in these dashboards to raise the bar
on the customer service they provide.
“As an organization, you must be clear on your initiatives for the year — your priorities as a whole.”
Ashley Bard believes that it’s easy for IT teams to get stuck in the details of their work, unintentionally slowing down the decision-making process and hindering forward momentum. “Make sure that you have a leader who can help guide that decision-making process, make a decision, and then give clear
direction so that the teams can continue moving forward,” she advises. Also, when an IT team works in a silo, it can end up owning projects that actually should be led by the business. “ If you don’t have a liaison or a product owner, depending on whether you’re in an agile or waterfall environment, IT can
sometimes take charge of leading product projects. In some cases, it should really be operations driving the need, and then the IT team coming back with the technology and the solutions to fill those gaps,” she says. Enabling autonomy at middle management levels, allows for IT teams to drive strategy
in their areas of responsibility, which can create value for their specific customers.
What causes these common IT mistakes? “This starts at the very top,” Bard says. “As an organization, you must be clear on your initiatives for the year— your priorities as a whole. Once the business has defined its strategic goals, IT leaders must help their teams understand how the work of IT aligns with the business and ultimately creates business value.”
This is an excerpt from 9 Experts on How to Align IT’s Work to Company Strategy. The eBook was generously sponsored by Workfront.
