As the economy continues to grow, organizations continue to pump investments in an effort to attain greater efficiency and minimized costs. Information technology plays an important role in such efforts. Organizations use technology to increase output by integrating systems used for front-end and back-end operations. Such integration provides all the departments within an organization with correct and complete information that gives insight of the customers’ perspective. It also avails the opportunity for organizations to systematize their end-to-end corporate developments.
In order to achieve this, an organization should not understate the importance of a good methodology. One such example is the integration of CRM and ERP systems. Over the years, there have been difficulties in integrating the two systems owing to the differences in their architecture and lack of clear data exchange standards. Consequently, most organizations implement the two systems individually. With the use of good methodology, there is the availability of solutions that make the integrations of these two systems possible. Such solutions eliminate the use of stand-alone systems that are expensive and time-consuming. Ultimately, this goes to show that organizations should not understate the use of good methodology.
Management Processes
The Chief information Officer has responsibilities to take care of the organization’s entire IT infrastructure including other technological resources. As such, his roles must revolve around in management processes some of which include the following:
- Ensuring common processes: The chief information officer defines common processes in the organization in an effort to develop them. The CIO also ensures the repetition of successful processes of similar projects. The CIO should also ensure that the project management principles are applicable to other methodologies used by the organization. One strategy that could influence such a management process is to set up system policies and procedures with rules and regulations that support the management process.
- Benchmarking: This management process is similar to the previous one in that it is a continuous process. It however aims to improve the organizational processes so as to stay competitively ahead of other organizations in similar industries. The CIO, in this case, must identify the organizations with whom to benchmark. The strategy that supports this management process is a competitive set-up of the organization.
- Continuous improvement: This management process is also quite similar to the other two management processes. In this type of management process, the CIO utilizes the information gathered through benchmarking to make informed decisions as to whether such information has any effect on the combination of the different organizational methodologies into a single methodology. The strategy that supports this type of management process is continuously and rigorously monitoring, evaluating and controlling the business processes.
