Where's the value?

Today seems to have been a "where's the value?" day for me. I was fortunate enough to sit in on a Gartner presentation today by John Roberts where he put forward the observation of cost vs value in IT. In essence most good CIOs and IT managers know the cost of their IT resources (people included) but have some difficulty quantifying the value they return to the business. It seems knowing the value that you, as an individual contributor, or the resources at your disposal as a manager, return to the business is just as important as what it costs to provide the return - yet we focus on cost, probably because our infrastructure is better set up to measure it that way.

Following that session, while working on the growing Microsoft Online offerings I stumbled across the Energizer case study video and found a particularly profound closing remark by Randy Benz, the CIO.

"There is no value to my company in me running any hardware. The value that I bring to my organisation is in how I take any of these tools and apply them to the business problem."