Keep Improving

It is indifferent to whether you use mainframes or not. It certainly has no relation to the size of your information technology budget.

High information productivity can be found in organizations that have a balanced approach to management. IT is treated as an important contributor to achieving this balance but not more than that. These organizations deal with each function, including marketing, production, research, IT and administration, as equally important ingredients.

In an organic view of the enterprise, you can't afford to have any part cause malfunctions in other parts of the organization. Everybody depends on everybody else doing their respective job to create value. Productivity is the consequence of cooperation, integration, learning, shared accumulation of knowledge and clarity of goals and objectives. Without these attributes, even the most powerful supercomputer would be a wasted resource.

One of the fundamental principles of cybernetics is that overall performance of any system depends on how all its parts interact, not on how those parts work in isolation. When the efficiency of parts taken individually improves, it does not follow that the performance of the system as whole will get better. Enhancing an isolated business function to realize lower costs, improved efficiency or some other narrow functional objective such as modernization, may degrade overall results.

To increase your firm's information productivity, you must first identify which elements of its complex cybernetic interactions are defective. Here are some practical suggestions for IS managers:

1. Participate in the corporate planning and budgeting processes. These events are the only occasions when all the value-added creation elements that make up the information productivity ratio are open to negotiation.

2. Identify the major causes of value-detraction. Information productivity gains are realized much faster by eliminating the negative influences first rather than by initially focusing on new ventures or deploying the latest technology.

3. Start analyzing these deficiencies as if they were pathologies. Corporations, like people, suffer from diseases. They have asset sickness, experience marketing myopia, encounter broken engineering, suffer from congested overhead, become exposed to competitor bites or show customer-neglect afflictions. Each disease calls for a different remedy.

4. Become a valued member of the executive team that is assigned to restoring good business health. IT should be seen as part of a comprehensive solution, not somebody's idea of injecting the most recently advertised miracle drug.

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