Thursday 19 February 2009

Systems v services

How do we get the maximum business benefit from our systems? That was the question I posed to a Gartner analyst this morning. Well, of course the first mistake I made was to talk about systems, and not services. I knew I'd made that mistake as soon as I'd said it! We had a very good discussion after that, with some good suggestions. One was that we establish a Good Practice Council - not specifically looking at IT, but a place where staff can exchange ideas about how they do things, and the most efficient way of doing business. Use of IT systems (services!) should come out of that. And the other important consideration is that this shouldn't be run by us - the IT department. We should be members, but our role is to facilitate, not to drive.

One of the other areas we discussed was what makes a good service - is it efficiency, or cost effectiveness, or that it's customer focused? Definitely the latter!

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