LAWTECH GURU BLOG by Jeff Beard

Four Best Practices From World-Class CIOs

CIO.com has a nice article summarizing the following four best practices that can lead to better IT performance at a lower cost. According to the Hackett Group, a research company that focuses on benchmarking, the following items differentiated the world-class IT groups from median IT organizations:

• Better use of outsourcing
• Simplification and standardization of IT systems
• Higher levels of process discipline, and
• Better alignment with business goals

These truly make a lot of sense to me. I've seen numerous IT departments get bogged down trying to support duplicative and overlapping systems, cleaning up inconsistent data due to lack of controls (process discipline), and just having every program under the sun installed and supported. Sometimes less is more, particularly when it's strategically orchestrated.

Interestingly, Ron Friedmann just posted a similar thought, "Technology is Not Enough". He references an article which "supports the view that IT expenditures have little impact on productivity unless they are accompanied by first-rate management practices."