The View from Here: Improving the Business Shouldn’t Put Anyone to Sleep

July 30, 2008

When The IT-Finance Connection launched a few months ago, we thought that we’d cover unified communications, VoIP and other sexy new applications and services.

We were right. We have covered those topics. What we didn’t anticipate is that a tremendous number of less exciting topics would push their way front and center. Such issues as governance, risk and compliance (GRC), time sheet management, business reporting and other topics all have gotten their share of attention.

Vendors and service providers that deal with these topics would object to their being called dull, of course. They just are different—and perhaps can appear dull—in that they deal with the intricacies of actually running a business and finding ways, through communications between IT and other departments, to do things better.

Money is saved and efficiencies created when IT gets into the trenches with other departments. The opposite is true when the details are ignored. Consider what Gordon Burnes, the Vice President, Sales and Marketing for OpenPages, wrote in a story posted yesterday about the emergence of parallel and wasteful silos in GRC systems:

In part, this situation reflects the lack of insight that IT, in general, has into the risks that business groups are dealing with. So they are reluctant to impose a solution on something they don’t understand.

So not communicating leads directly to inadequate systems. The result, Burnes maintains, is a series of point solutions instead of a robust and comprehensive GRC infrastructure. This isn’t good:

It is costly and even dangerous to manage GRC in this manner, as the extent of an organization’s risks remain hidden from executives and largely unmanaged.

Such issues are replicated across other areas in which IT must, in essence, is called upon to get involved in other departments’ business. Posts and stories about these issues isn’t as exciting as material about, for instance, new applications that a unified communications system would bring. But it isn’t dull. Saving money and improving how the business operates never is.