Winning baseball pitchers have a secret we need to know. It's not the different types of pitches they can hurtle that win games. Victory comes by selecting just the right pitch for the current batter's next swing.

We have the same challenge when playing the game of IT projects funding. Proposals that pitch the right kind of value to the right person get the money. Unfortunately, what executives value is undergoing radical change. As a consequence, most business cases based on value assertions made in the recent past will fail today.

Let's examine these changes in value so we can be ready to throw the right pitch at the right time. To throw the winning value proposition, we need to know what makes one pitch different from another, what pitch to use, and when to throw it.

Okay team, here's how an all-star value pitcher prepares for that winning throw:

Know value's DNA

All types of baseball pitches can be specified by variations of a few fundamental factors. The same is true for value. The DNA of a baseball pitch is speed, spin, height, and predictability. The DNA of value is resource focus, adaptability, tangibility, time-to-value, risk, and duration. Each of these six value components is being drastically redefined. For example, value's resource focus is moving away from capital assets and cost savings to intellectual capital (i.e., human knowledge assets) and revenue enhancement.

Value components, such as an enterprise's adaptability, have become more important than its strength at any given moment of time. Intangibles (i.e., nonmonetary payoffs) are outscoring tangible factors (i.e., hard money), while fast decision cycles, smaller projects, and rapid payback get management's nod.

And if that isn't enough change for one generation of senior management, competitive demands are forcing executives to embrace strategies of inherently much higher risk to avoid being swamped by sea changes in marketplace demands (see table below).

By discovering where on these value spectrums our management's comfort level resides, we are best equipped to throw the right value pitch at the right time.

Value factor	Old world value	New world value
Resource focus	Capital assets and cost savings	Intellectual capital and revenue enhancement
Importance of adaptability to future change	Little to some	Much
Tangibility/intangibility of value calculations	Much/little	Some/some
Time to value realization/size of project	2+ years/large	A few months/small
Role of risk	Much avoidance	Willingness to accept more
Duration of the investment decision process itself	Months	Weeks

Update your repertoire

Different types of value have natural life cycles. While a ballgame favorite in decades past, the screwball pitch rarely makes an appearance today. The rules of the game, its technology, and the audience's expectations have all changed. Value is no different.

Read the signals and make the pitch

While the nature of value evolves, at any point in time, your executives may or may not have caught the wave of the latest value craze. Your job is to find out if they are early, typical, or late adopters of the new value concepts.

Clues to your management's value preferences can be found in annual reports, published executive interviews, or via a chat with your friendly executive sponsor and/or CFO. Here's a tip: Rather than completely chucking the old for the new world value, most managers prefer a blend of both.

In baseball, as in business cases, there is no substitute for throwing the perfect pitch. Start warming up now! //

Have some clever ways to unearth data nuggets? E-mail me at jkeen@decidingfactor.com.