Technologies and business processes are changing rapidly, thus the potential for IT to deliver real value to the enterprise has never been greater. Mark McDonald, in his blog at Gartner, calls it Amplifying the Enterprise.
According to McDonald, “Amplification, which involves taking a signal adding energy to it and sending it externally, provides an apt metaphor for the role of technologies like mobility and cloud. These technologies create new channels and platforms for reaching new customers, engaging existing customers and supporting revenue growth.
Amplification also involves handling feedback. Improperly handled feedback creates that screeching noise that you hear when someone uses a podium microphone. Feedback related technologies include analytics and social media, which provide better ways to understand and capture what, is happening inside and outside your organization.”
The role of enterprise IT is becoming richer as it looks both outward and inward to amplify the enterprise. An example, Gartner says, is taking on the challenge to eliminate distortions caused by duplicative processes, applications, and inefficiencies that lead to complexity, higher costs, and poor service. Or leveraging technology to mine and make sense of all the customer and competitive information found online. The role has expanded far beyond that of traditional IT management.
Amplifying the enterprise is fine-tuning and to some extent is transformational. It’s about focusing resources on initiatives that ultimately optimize the customer experience to drive revenue growth and remove unnecessary cost.
Benefits
Employees are one group sure to gain from the exercise of amplification: more responsibility, more strategic decision-making opportunities, and arguably most important, being challenged and inspired to solve problems and make a difference in the organization. In a blog interview with the CIO of a healthcare company, William Compton said one of his biggest challenges was keeping great employees motivated and challenged after a team completed a big project. Through amplification, enterprise IT will continually be pressed to discover and find solutions to new challenges that directly affect company revenue and the customer experience.
The other big winner of an amplified enterprise is the customer. Today, businesses have the tools to make them experts on their customers, and not just segments but individual customers. With social media, applications, data mining and other CRM tools, businesses have more information than they can currently distill. We no longer speak of customers in outdated terms such as “rate-payers" or even the "mass-market”. We know too much. In fact, enterprise IT will play one of the biggest roles in helping businesses gain relevant information on individual customers and providing the technology and tools to enable meaningful communication with them.
