Are you fully leveraging your current technologies?

by Laura Brandenburg on February 11, 2009 · 0 comments

in Current Capabilities Assessment Series,Leading Organizational Change,Strategic Business Analyst

Taking the time to conduct a complete assessment of your organization’s technology-driven capabilities can be a time-consuming and expensive undertaking. However, not expending the time or effort sets you up to miss potential opportunities to create more value from your technologies.

Here are some possible outcomes delivered when the assessment is coupled with other efforts:

  1. Make an informed decision as to how to fold an acquired company’s technology stack into yours.
  2. Add new functionality to the application without breaking what works today.
  3. Create operational efficiencies through simple technology enhancements or by leveraging what’s already available.
  4. Create an action plan for integrating two or more distinct technology stacks.
  5. Support organizational growth and increase flexibility by upgrading a legacy, proprietary system to an enterprise-scale system or Software-as-a-Service Solution.
  6. Reduction in customer-complaints due to undiscovered bugs making it into production.
  7. Make changes to current staffing without losing critical knowledge.

A Current Capabilities Assessment can and should be more than a document.  Leveraged widely as part of larger change efforts can become a launch pad for improved investments in IT and alignment of IT with business goals.  In today’s tough economic times, we have an increased responsibility to leverage our capabilities to the fullest. How can you do that without clearly understanding what, indeed, your technology is capable of?

By Laura Brandenburg. Laura Brandenburg is an independent business analyst consultant. She is passionate about the BA profession and is committed to contributing by supporting this blog as a forum for business analysts to build on each other's experiences. View more blog posts by Laura Brandenburg

Related posts:

  1. The multiple perspectives of a Current Capabilities Assessment
  2. Reverse Engineering Requirements: Select a Business Owner and Identify Scope
  3. How to leverage your BAs when project work is on hold

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