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Methodology
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Business Impact Lifecycle...Realizing business/IT alignment |
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In today’s business world, there’s no such thing as IT projects—only
business projects with IT components. This may be a matter of
perspective— but it’s a perspective that has never been more important
to business success. At a time when so many businesses depend on IT to
do nearly everything, IT needs to be seen as an enabler for executing
business objectives. Research has shown that the highest performing IT
organizations operate as valued partners that share the same enterprise
vision and objectives as their business counterparts.
To orient itself this way, IT should run as a business that is focused
on the needs of the customer—in this case, the rest of the organization
it serves. This requires better alignment with the business.
Business/IT alignment, however, is a slippery subject. Everybody talks
about it—few have really done it. What’s involved? How do you take the
first steps? What does it even mean to be aligned?
Pepperweed Consulting has some answers. Put simply,
alignment is the ability of IT to understand and meet the needs of the
business on a consistent basis. When properly aligned with the
business, IT becomes a tool to employ for competitive advantage rather
than an obstacle to overcome. Pepperweed can help you achieve alignment—not only by giving you the
tools to understand what needs to be done but also by delivering the
specific solutions that help you realize your objectives.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. The same holds true for business/IT
alignment. Pepperweed takes an incremental
approach—one that focuses on specific initiatives that deliver tangible
business benefits today while increasingly building the capabilities
required for IT to coordinate with the business, understand its
requirements and realistically assess the resources available to meet
those requirements. The end result is a more adaptable enterprise,
capable of leveraging the power of IT to execute on changing business
strategy and compete more effectively. |
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Pepperweed has worked closely and intensely with many clients to prioritize strategic objectives, pinpoint IT initiatives that improve business benefits, and develop a rational, comprehensive approach to IT transformation that will improve IT’s alignment with the business moving forward.
A key tool in this process is the concept of the business impact lifecycle. Think of it as a roadmap that shows how discrete aspects of your IT infrastructure can be connected to improve the way IT interacts with the business to meet common objectives. Whatever your starting point, the business impact lifecycle helps you see where you’re heading and what your final destination should be.
Let’s say that your organization has a compelling need to improve IT controls and implement a comprehensive change and configuration solution. Pepperweed can help you execute on this objective with Pathfinder — a comprehensive and prescriptive process modeling solution built on our own Pepperweed Process Model that provides the best out-of-the-box practices to accelerate implementation and facilitate user adoption. With an eye to enabling ongoing integration, Pepperweed implements and federates a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to support the automation of critical processes such as change workflow and request or change reconciliation. Employing this approach—one that’s based on the Business Impact Lifecycle and account for future integration beforehand—Pepperweed can then provide prescriptive directives on what’s next, based on what’s already been built and where your organization needs to go.
Pepperweed understands that few organizations can benefit from a boil-the-ocean approach to IT transformation. But it’s also true that an incremental approach can be derailed by a lack of long-term vision. This is the value of the Business Impact Lifecycle. Providing an at-a-glance perspective on the core IT functions and services that are required by the business to accomplish corporate objectives, the Business Impact Lifecycle helps you maintain a focus on what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and what you should be focusing on next. The Business Impact Lifecycle is also the high level framework that much of our focused delivery solutions are based on. For example, the connections and discrepancies the lifecycle shows between IT Service Management and Change and Configuration Execution map directly into each of those specific solution areas in terms of collateral and delivery material.
With innovative IT service and infrastructure management solutions and unparalleled expertise in the leading workflow and technology solutions, Pepperweed helps you get immediate business benefits from each project you undertake—while simultaneously laying a firm foundation to improve business IT/alignment over time. |
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Customer Reference
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"Pepperweed delivered solution makes our jobs easier. We can
keep our customer sites up and running with greater reliability and
manage events much more quickly. Pepperweed Consulting was instrumental
in helping us successfully deploy HP's technology. Pepperweed's
resources were responsive to our needs and completed their mandate on
time and on budget."
John Bratanov
Director, Strategic Systems Development
Totality Corporation
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Technology Services 
