Partnering with China Businesses Demands IT Assessment
China’s IT organizations are maturing under what is called an “informatization” policy. Companies considering a partnership with a Chinese organization should carefully assess the quality and maturity of IT assets according to CIO Insight’s article on “China’s IT Challenge“:
“Today, those capabilities appear more uneven than those of their counterparts in U.S. IT organizations. Inexperience with enterprise applications, command-and-control management and reporting structures that bury the IT function within the company bureaucracy cause Chinese IT organizations to range widely in sophistication.”
My post on how companies neglect IT asset and data quality assessment in their takeover targets applies equally to those companies considering Chinese partnerships. The cost of cleaning up bad data and poor IT systems can be great, let alone relying on such data and systems to produce information to assess partnering opportunities.
Partnership projects must be defined to initially assess and then improve IT assets and data to enable the partnering business processes:
“For now, CIOs outside of China should not assume the IT practices of their Chinese partners are the same as theirs. Instead, CIOs should seek to understand the IT strengths and weaknesses of their Chinese partners, and compensate for them.”
Have you recently partnered with a Chinese, or any, organization? Did you assess IT systems and underlying data? Please share any experiences you have had. Is degree of assessment of partnership potential different from that of a takeover? How so?
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