While many IT organisations are better organised, have better communications and project management, most have still not learnt to focus on business processes, says Jean-Louis Previdi, Meta Group senior VP and research director.
Speaking at the opening of the Meta Group`s annual technology conference, METAmorphisis 2004, in Gauteng yesterday, Previdi said the group had a mildly optimistic outlook for IT because of a number of changes in IT over the last couple of years.
[VIDEO]"Over the last two years, IT organisations have improved in their ability to communicate their needs to the board, have organised themselves better, which shows a greater maturity, and have improved in project management, although they still need to make a shift to focus on program management," he said.
IT`s attempts to improve itself have meant that IT organisations have made their infrastructure more adaptive with an increase in areas like open standards, said Previdi.
But for the most part, IT organisations are still trying to take the bottom-up approach when it comes to business, he noted. "While it is definitely cheaper for business to be structured from the top down, because most IT organisations do not understand business processes as well as business does, they have not taken this approach."
Previdi said it is for this reason that companies like IBM and HP have had so much business, because they understand business processes and are able to work side by side with companies over a number of years to build their businesses from the top down.
Looking ahead, Previdi said the organisation of the future must be adaptive, which is the theme for METAmorphisis 2004. He said companies that focus on business reality first would become adaptive by managing their portfolio of applications properly, understanding the business impact of IT and balancing risk vs reward effectively when implementing projects.
"In the future, we expect outsourcing to increase as companies focus on providing solutions, while not necessarily producing the products for those solutions. For example, a company like Cisco provides routers in their solutions, but they don`t manufacture them. There will therefore be a shift in companies to focus on research and development and branding while outsourcing much of the rest of the business."
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