One of the first questions board members will ask the CIO when you push a technology initiative is about ROI. Board members need assurances that the money they are investing in technology initiatives must reap rich rewards.
As a CIO of the company, your job is to convince them by proving that the technology initiatives you are trying to push can deliver sustainable growth for your business.
Even if you get your desired budget approved by the board of directors and C-suite executives, they will continuously ask you about the progress you are making toward achieving the end goal. Avoid making false claims, as failure to deliver the promised ROI can dent your reputation.
This will negatively impact the trust board members have in you, and you will have a hard time securing funds for future projects.
How can you boost the return on investment of your IT projects? That is exactly what we will discuss in this article. In this article, you will learn about five effective tips to improve the return on investment on your IT projects.
How to Increase the ROI of Your IT Projects?
Here are five proven tips that will help you get the best return on investment from your IT projects.
Alignment With Business Goal Is Crucial
IT projects usually lack engagement from other department heads and stakeholders, which is why they start to drift away from the business goals slowly. As a CIO, your goal is to minimize that gap by creating alignment between your IT projects and business goals.
You should set your sights on a business mission and vision when setting IT goals. This allows you to tap into new opportunities. You can personalize your IT services and products to cater to the specific needs of the customers by developing a better understanding of customer preferences.
Encourage Diversity
Most businesses make the mistake of creating a one-dimensional team with individuals specializing in only one domain. Instead, they should focus on creating a diverse team with individuals from different departments having different skills and experiences and diverse perspectives on things.
This allows your team to be more efficient and smarter.
Diversity of roles and functional units can help your team develop a comprehensive strategy that looks at a problem from different angles and perspectives. This makes it easy for them to resolve even the most complex issues and innovate faster.
This is also critical for eliminating bias in decision-making.
Additionally, it pushes your team to challenge the status quo and think outside the box. It enables you to experiment with new ideas, test them and determine which ideas are worth pursuing and which ones should be dropped off.
All this is extremely important in today’s rapidly evolving business and IT landscape, where customers continuously demand newer products and services.
Adopt Scalable Technologies
The pace at which things change in information technology forces businesses to adopt a dynamic approach. Gone are the days when static solutions used to work.
Today that is not the case. As an IT leader, you should invest in scalable technologies such as VPS Server in Norway that can not only fulfill your current business needs but can also fulfill your future needs.
As your business needs to expand, IT solutions must adapt accordingly. Scalability can severely impact your return on investment. The more scalable the technology is, the more return you can get out of your investment.
When evaluating technologies and solutions to implement, don’t be fooled by its initial technological and resource requirements, as it can slowly but surely grow in years to come.
As your business needs growth, your IT solution must keep pace with it otherwise, there is no point in pouring thousands of dollars into a technology that cannot be scaled.
Just because a technology or IT solution can scale to meet your needs does not mean that you should adopt it. You should also consider other factors such as the cost. How much does it cost to scale your solution to meet your current business demands?
For instance, cheap dedicated server hosting can also be scaled to multiple dedicated servers, but it would cost much more than scaling your cloud infrastructure. Additionally, monitoring cloud infrastructure is also more easy and affordable.
In a cloud-based environment, you can add and remove resources with just a click of a button. This makes scaling a cloud-based infrastructure much more convenient.
More importantly, you will only pay for the resources you use, which will also keep your operational costs under control. On the other hand, buying a dedicated server doesn’t offer you that flexibility and scalability options.
Even if they do, they are much more complex to scale and cost you much more money.
Embrace Agile Methodology
Most IT leaders tend to believe that agile methodology is a great choice when it comes to software development or project, but it cannot be implemented in the same way for technology implementation initiatives.
Agile methodology is an ideal choice for streamlining your IT ROI. Agile helps you to make continuous improvements in iteration and deliver a more refined final output.
Instead of delivering the final product and asking for feedback, agile flipped the script. With agile, you create a minimum viable product and then take feedback from stakeholders after every iteration is complete.
This not only saves you from costly rework or changing directions mid-way through the project but also helps you continuously improve the product with every cycle.
As a result, your products tend to fulfill the user requirements and market demands in a much better way as compared to other methodologies.
Follow a Platform-Based Approach
Another great way to boost the ROI of your IT projects is to adopt a platform-based approach instead of deploying point solutions.
The biggest benefit of taking a platform-based approach is that your IT solution is designed by considering the needs of all the functional units and business streams.
Best of all, all internal components are fully utilized instead of sourcing them from external parties. This goes a long way in minimizing costs and improving your returns.
What steps do you take to enhance the ROI of IT projects? Let us know in the comments section below.
