Run the Business IT Services Add Value

IT professionals may provide support services, instead of working solely on projects, over their careers. Support work is important to keeping the business or enterprise running, requires a substantial percentage of the IT budget, and is under constant pressure to demonstrate efficiencies, ie: cost savings. It is a perennial challenge to tell the holistic IT value story and even more challenging to describe and defend the support space. Business leaders identify with project work, which generally targets improving, growing or innovating -the-business. And, support work, sometimes referred to as run-the-business, takes a back seat. I'm always on the lookout for strategies that improve the articulation of IT value. Here's an interesting development in the ERP space worth watching.

SAP is taking a step forward in the support space, by aligning its mandated maintenance cost increase (think unhappy customers) with demonstration of business value drivers, as defined by an index of key performance indicators. The index will be measured at a representative short-list of customers and shared with the all. This work could be helpful to IT professionals and CIOs in articulating how support costs align with business value. And, SAP's maintenance fee increase is contingent upon demonstrating the defined value KPIs. ...

... "This effort will help customers by providing a transparent mechanism to link their support investment to the value delivered. SAP has agreed to postpone the subsequent price increase schedule until the targeted improvements measured by the SUGEN KPI Index are met. Successful delivery on KPIs is expected to demonstrate tangible cumulative cost savings for customers. This value delivery is targeted to be fully realized within the four-year time frame of the benchmarking program. " ...

Via SAP: Enterprise Support Value Index