Creating Value with Assets & Services

A lot of talk floats around of creating IT as a strategic component when 60% of its activities are service or support related. The art of IT alignment with proper governance wrapped around them not only makes IT a strategic component but enables its support functions to add value to business assets and services. In some instances values can be quantified in financial terms and in some non-financial terms. The non-financial terms are equally important as they fuel the financial components on a continuous form of inputs or future ROI's and VOI's. These non-financial value creation ideas can be:

1) Customer Perceptions: Customer's preferences are influenced by perceptions and in turn perceptions are influenced by attributes of a service or product in terms of value, desire, previous experience, position in the marketplace, need and self-image.

2) Reference values of services: This may be very vaguely defined and sometimes may be plain facts. To find our reference value of services or products, an organization needs to create a on-going dialog with its customers that feeds data into a knowledge base that teaches the producer or creator of the service or the product valuable lessons learnt, what brings value, how value can be added and how best take advantage of preferences and perceptions the customer generates.

3) Finally the economic value of a service to a customer is the sum of the customer's reference value and the net difference in value the customer associates with the service. The positive difference comes from the service's utility and warranty. Negative difference comes from losses suffered by the customer as a result of utilizing the service.

Thoughts,

Sam