Something that a lot of IT professionals don’t understand is that there are no IT initiatives. There are operations initiatives with IT needs. In other words, IT people should be enablers that stay out of the way of the operations guys.

That said, operations and IT need to work together to identify bottlenecks and other problems. As operations works on process issues, IT should be focused on the information side of the solution. Those of us in IT should have our eyes and ears on other verticals to see how they solve similar problems.

In an ideal world, we should say competitor X is doing this with TMS or another technology. Then we need to explain how this solution affects operations and people’s jobs. Then operations determines what benefits they think could be achieved. They then have to decide if they want to get behind the suggested solution or have IT find something else.

Once operations decides what works for them, they need to work with IT to build a schedule as well as to set milestones to complete the project.

But operations and IT can’t work separately from other parts of the company. All the key players should know what is being spent and the expected value of it. Only then will people understand why it is worthwhile to spend money here and not some place else.