CHAPTER 14

Operational Enterprise IT Capabilities and Competencies

Given the importance of operational competences are to trust, credibility, performance, and execution, it's possible that this set of three enterprise IT capabilities should come first.

Chapter 14 describes the three operational enterprise IT capabilities, as shown in Exhibit 14.1:

  1. Cost & Performance
  2. Service & Operational Excellence
  3. Sourcing

While operational in character, these capabilities equally contribute to the issues of response to turbulence and uncertainty, trust, and partnership. It can be argued they are foremost in both, as the inflexibilities of bureaucracy and unwillingness to change often loom largest in these kinds of operational capabilities. Similarly, Sourcing raises all the relationship questions between the business and the sources, as well as among the IT organizations (e.g., issues like security, use of networks, and so forth.

Enterprise IT Capability: Service & Operational Excellence

This enterprise capability covers IT services and includes the elements of operational excellence (Exhibit 14.2).

The phrase “operational excellence” often dominates business and IT management conversations. In our context, we use this phrase to describe the first of the six stages of demonstrated IT performance for the enterprise, as described in the section on Trust and the Total Value Performance Model (TVPM) in Chapter 2. The issue here is whether the enterprise is capable of specifying and delivering ...

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