Focus on Business Value

The first defining and key principle is to focus on delivering value to your business by understanding and meeting it's needs.

Your IT activity should contribute to the overall value proposition of the business.

IT should be an enabler to the business and no longer just seen as an overhead.

A simple and very basic view of a generic IT interaction with business value may look like this:

• The business has a goal
• But has some limits on its capability to deliver that goal
• There are often many constraints in realising that goal with the capabilities that they have
• So they define a process to drive an outcome
  • This business process may utilise some IT component
  • The operation of which may trigger some engagement with IT
  • After identifying the gaps in delivering success through the IT component, a work package is commissioned
  • The work package will then deliver what is needed, so the business can realise the outcome
• And thus ultimately returns some value

Try to understand where IT fits in the delivery of business value.