Don’t Indiscriminately Minimize Cost – Rather than focusing on across-the-board cost cutting, these companies take a very different perspective and seek to maximize value at the lowest achievable cost, in part by reallocating spending from technology infrastructure to application management.
Hackett’s research clearly shows that indiscriminate IT cost cutting has a negative impact on performance in other functional areas.
Maximize Value of Information Assets – World-class companies obtain the greatest possible return on their technology investment by maximizing the value of information assets to end-users through data standardization, rich metadata, online information access, analytical capabilities, and alignment of the information architecture with business initiatives such as enterprise performance management.
This is also an area where a investment can lead to significant ROI—provided you do it well, said Dorr.
“Really (it’s) leveraging the wealth of data that typically already exists but focusing on the data management side of that. It’s very complex but that also means there’s a big opportunity. And if you are a little better at this than the next guy, then you have an opportunity to get a better return and that’s what we see” in world class companies.