This new report from the IT Policy Compliance Group describes how high-performance organizations are using IT as a competitive advantage to generate more capital to invest in acquiring new customers and markets, reducing their capital and operating expenses, and at the same time significantly reducing risk related to the use of IT.  Results from the research indicate:

• Customer focused strategies for financial and competitive advantage in IT are gaining unfair shares of customers, revenues and profits
• Much higher spend on IT, information security and audit are driving significant market and financial advantages
• Prioritized risk-reward practices are maximizing business value and minimizing risk
• Contextual scorecards for different functions and business units are closing the business-IT alignment-gap to drive higher value and less risk

Context-based Information Defining Outcomes

Slightly more than 1  in  10 organizations (12 percent) use information from how IT is being used to generate new customers, retain existing customers, take advantage of financial and market opportunity, while using IT for competitive advantage.

These high performance organizations are managing IT very differently than all other organizations, by using information about IT to maximize higher yield and minimize business risk related to the use of information systems.

The most recent research reveals these organizations are spending:

• 70 percent more on IT to deliver higher yield
• 100 percent more on information security to minimize business risk

A large part of the success driven by these organizations is from the use of simple but effective practices for managing both value and risk related to the use of IT, involving:

• Identifying and prioritizing value and risk related to the use of IT
• Identifying and prioritizing IT assets contributing to value, risk or impacted by regulation or law
• Simplifying value and risk management to low, medium and high
• Using frequent monitoring and management of change to increase value and reduce risk
• Automating change management, data collection and reporting
• Using metrics for value, risk and performance indicators
• Publishing contextual scorecards to inform and direct people
• Using contextual scorecards about IT that are relevant to different stakeholders to measure progress
• Employing contextual scorecards to govern value and risk from IT

See how you can make use of these findings  and start on your own path to gaining competitive advantage with better practices for using IT in your organization.