IT organisations are maturing as CIOs become more strategic, and their departments start focusing more on corporate governance and aligning their work with corporate goals.
As such, more and more IT departments are using business intelligence (BI) tools to improve their value to the business and as they mature, they need the right BI tools at the right stages.
"Although by definition IT departments are typically reactive, they have to become more proactive and strategic. The role of the CIO is shifting from the technologist to the commercial and business role, more synchronised with the enterprise.
"IT departments have never really used many BI products and solutions themselves, although they are starting to use them in order to become more strategic," said Richard Seery, Program Director of SAS IT Intelligence of SAS EMEA. He was addressing delegates to the recent SAS Forum, the premier local BI user group event held in Johannesburg.
"However, IT departments are using BI in too fragmented a fashion, often using different tools in limited areas. This multi-vendor, silo approach is a proven failure. Having one proven BI vendor helps the IT department to move forward in a more coherent and strategic way, in line with the business."
"Furthermore, IT departments need not only reporting, but real analytics. They don't need reports telling them, for example, that a critical applications server fell over. Obviously, more useful are predictions of when that might happen again or more importantly why it happened and how it could be avoided.
"If IT departments can start applying BI in more sensible ways, their environments become more optimised. This is where SAS IT Intelligence comes in," said Seery.
He points out that IT must be optimised to provide a stable environment and enable profitable transactions from core business functions at service levels acceptable to the business. It must also support the corporate strategy by having links to the business to ensure it supports business directives.
"SAS IT Intelligence gives the hindsight, insight and foresight to optimise the impact of IT on the organisation," said Seery.
"It is the difference between managing and optimising IT."
The solution encompasses resource, service and financial optimisation. As a first step it enables IT to optimise its resources, including the capacity of hardware environments, people and information.
IT can then optimise service by working with the business to meet its expectations. And once good service levels are agreed, then the two can agree that certain services will cost the business unit more money.
"Good service delivery is not only about technology," said Seery.
"Tools and technology can help, but IT organisations are also going through a maturity process. As they mature, they start to manage capacity, then optimise services, and then get costs under control. And they need the right tools as they mature."
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