Public Bids, Security, Talent Retention: Three News Stories Questioning the “Cross-Functional Value” of IT Investment

Last week, three seemingly loosely related IT news stories were reported. Support for entering public tenders, security measures for Microsoft 365, and the digitalization of onboarding (internal training and placement processes) for new graduate hires. To executives and CTOs, these might appear as individual “problem-solving tools” or “topics within specialized domains.”

However, this is precisely where the fundamental structure lies that prevents many companies from achieving results with their IT investments. It is the problem of individually optimized IT initiatives running in parallel without a common management objective (objective function), failing to generate integrated value. This article uses these three news stories as material to consider the design of the “cross-functional value” that management should seek from IT.

Three Scenes of “Local Optimization” Revealed by the News

First, let’s organize what each news story is advocating from a management perspective.

1. Support for Entering Public Bids: Expansion Strategy for “Business IT”

This is news of a webinar titled ‘OK with Zero Track Record: A Public Bidding Primer for SMEs.’ This can be described as a topic of “Business IT” aimed at开拓ing new sales channels (the public sector market). Adapting to electronic bidding systems for public procurement (e.g., “JETRO’s Procurement Information Portal” or local government e-procurement systems), digital creation and management of proposal documents, accumulating digital achievements to earn evaluation points—here, IT is positioned as a direct means for sales expansion. The objective function here is “Acquiring new orders and expanding sales.”

2. Ransomware Countermeasures for Microsoft 365: Fortifying the Defense of “Management IT”

This is a webinar titled ‘Ransomware Countermeasures for Microsoft 365, Manageable Even with a Small IT Team.’ This addresses the challenge of “Management IT”: how a small information systems department (IT) manages the security risks of an already implemented core SaaS (Microsoft 365). Enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA), configuring restore settings for SharePoint/OneDrive, filtering suspicious emails—the goal here is “ensuring business continuity and minimizing damage from incidents,” i.e., “stability and cost control.”

3. Digitalization of Onboarding: The Budding of “Strategic IT”

This is survey results stating ‘Over 70% responded that “digitalizing or standardizing onboarding impacts preventing early turnover.”‘ This is a movement to standardize and streamline the early deployment and retention of new employees using digital tools (e.g., Fleekdrive, Notion, dedicated HRTech tools). This approaches the realm of “Strategic IT,” which enhances human resource development and organizational reproducibility. The objective is “talent retention and accumulation of organizational knowledge that is not dependent on individuals.”

Now, in your company, which departments are promoting these three initiatives, and for what purposes? In many cases, 1 is likely driven by the sales or business development department, 2 by the IT department, and 3 by HR/General Affairs, each with their own budgets and KPIs. This is the typical schema of “fragmented objective functions.”

The Investment Inefficiency and Opportunity Loss Caused by “Fragmented Objective Functions”

What problems arise when each is locally optimized? Let’s look at specific examples.

Case: The Sales Department Wanting to Win Public Bids vs. IT Prioritizing Security

Suppose the sales department wants to actively apply for public bids and considers introducing an external cloud storage service to share and edit proposal documents. However, the IT department might not approve it, citing “uploading important documents to external services violates security policy.” As a result, sales might start using the service as unauthorized “shadow IT” (IT used outside of management’s control), ironically increasing the risk of information leaks or causing delays in the proposal activities themselves.

At the root of this conflict lie two objectives not integrated at the management level: “sales expansion” and “risk minimization.” Because management has not defined “where is the acceptable balance between IT risk and speed in this public bidding strategy,” a tug-of-war between departments occurs.

Case: The Disconnect Between HR’s Onboarding Tool and Actual Business Tools

Even if the HR department introduces a splendid onboarding portal, if the operational manuals documented there do not match the latest操作方法 of the Salesforce, Freee, or core systems actually used on the front lines, new hires will be confused. Because the management and updating of the onboarding tool (HR-led) and business tools (led by each business unit) are disconnected, the investment effect is halved. Here too, the objectives of “standardized knowledge accumulation” and “the speed and flexibility of each business” are fragmented.

The “Cross-Functional Value” Management Should Design: A Single Axis Running Through the 3 News Stories

So, what kind of “cross-functional value” should executives extract and define from these three individual initiatives? It is the perspective of “building an integrated digital foundation (Digital Foundation) that supports the organization’s sustainable growth.”

Reinterpreting the three news stories from this perspective yields the following:

• Public Bidding Support: Not merely sales channel expansion, but a challenge of Digital Connectivity: “how to safely and efficiently connect external digital procurement platforms with the company’s own operations and proposal processes.”
• M365 Security Measures: Not merely defense, but establishing a Secure Operation Standard for the most widely used collaboration platform, making it the foundation for the security model of all other SaaS integrations.
• Digitalization of Onboarding: Not merely HR operational efficiency, but creating mechanisms for Standardization & Propagation of organizational knowledge and procedures on top of an established security foundation.

All of these are part of a higher-order management challenge: “reintegrating the SaaS and business processes that have grown in a fragmented manner into a single, secure, and sustainable foundation.”

Practical Steps: Re-examining IT Investment Based on Cross-Functional Value

Next, when new project or tool introduction proposals come up from departments, executives or CTOs should pose questions like the following:

1. How will this investment integrate with the existing “Digital Foundation”?

“Can this new onboarding tool use single sign-on (SSO) with the Microsoft 365 accounts all employees already use? Will the manuals created there be automatically backed up to SharePoint and fall under security policies?”

This question is the first gate to prevent new tools from becoming “islands.” Have them evaluate integration costs (API connectivity, user management) beforehand.

2. If this initiative succeeds, how can it be horizontally deployed to other areas?

“Can the electronic proposal document management process and security checklist developed for public bidding also be applied to regular proposal activities for important customers?”

“Can the M365 monitoring methodology established by a small IT team serve as a template for the monitoring model of other cloud services (e.g., CRM or ERP) to be introduced in the future?”

Considering horizontal deployment potential creates a perspective for expanding the potential return on investment (ROI).

3. Is the person responsible for this project defining its “cross-functional value”?

This is the most important question. If a proposal comes from the sales director saying “we want to introduce a public bidding support tool,” ask them: “Is it merely a tool for the sales department? Or does it have the potential to become our company’s standard gateway for transactions with external digital platforms?”

This is the moment to elevate the project leader’s awareness from “solving a departmental problem” to “building a company asset.”

Conclusion: IT Investment is “The Art of Management Integration”

Public bids, security, talent retention. These are merely facets of the diverse challenges management faces. As long as IT is used as a “toolbox” to solve these problems individually, it will remain a cost center and continue to be plagued by integration difficulties.

However, the essence that management should seek from IT is to “integrate” these fragmented challenges and opportunities, building a consistent foundation that supports the sustainable growth of the entire organization. Rather than being swayed by individual news stories or tool introductions, consistently ask where they fit into the bigger picture of your company’s “Digital Foundation” and how they should be connected.

That very act of constant questioning is the first and most crucial step in transforming IT into a true management resource.