IT Service Management concepts are supposed to help align IT with the business by making IT think in terms of services--and by then asking, what value does each service provide? IT and the business then agree on the value and sign a Service Level Agreement that (in part) proves IT is providing value to the business. So that's thinking about value in terms of services. Then recently I have been learning more about Lean Manufacturing, from lean.org and several books such as "Getting the Right Things Done" and "Lean Thinking". Lean again focuses on value, mainly in terms of the value added by each step of the process of creating something for a customer. So that's thinking about value in terms of a process or "pipeline" of events leading to a consumable product. In both these considerations of value, businesses to some extent have it easy. They have key performance indicators all based around money, such as quarterly profits, cost per unit, and so forth. Lean can help a manager say "what value does step #5 have, from the perspective of the customer?" and mean "how has the total monetary value of the product increased?" What can we do, as a University, to define IT's value? Or, more broadly, how do not-for-profits create a definition of value that allows them to ask at every step in a process, or for every service in a catalog, "what value is this creating?" I have a couple of guesses; for example, we have a University strategic plan, which we could use as a barometer for value. There seem to be a couple of goals that any University might target: improving the University's reputation, and facilitating learning outcomes for students. Land-grant Universities have additional commissions that make it clear why they exist: to teach, to research, and to provide outreach to the community. When that's done, how do we define value clearly enough enough that IT, which is often several steps away from the actual customer, can ask how each step in an IT process is providing value to the customer? If you have any answers please comment :-) Individual site contributors are solely responsible for the content of this web site.
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