Soft Side of IT

http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/Home/News.asp?id=42663

“There is no such thing as an ‘IT project.’ There are only business projects with an IT component“.

This is one of my favorite insight was this article was the first point out of the 20. My interpretation is any IT initiative has a business reason that drives & pays it. If the business reason can’t fund the project, then it’s a No-Go.

Reasons, not excuse
Business reason is driven by value & ROI (retun on investment) from a problem that needs solving, while excuse is solution driven & the explaination is an after-though.

A common example now-a-days installing is Vista & MS Office 2007:
Vista: Vista is the latest version of windows that has improved their interface to be smoother, this is a excuse since the value of improvement can’t be found. There is almost no business reason to switch Vista when XP is perfectly fine to use.

MS Office 2007: Excel always had a limit of 65536 rows & many report/data exceeds that limit. This causes a lot of report generation issues for standards. 2007 has taken out the limit & many are upgrade for this functionality.

People know the difference between a business excuse & a business reason. So next time when a No is giving, make sure it’s business sound & it’s presented as solving a existing pain/problem … It’s the basic requirement.