IT stands discredited to a large extent after the post-2000 meltdown. Many companies have failed to discern return on investment after investing multi-millions in production and other supporting systems. The extremely costly enterprise resource planning wave has failed, quite clearly, to provide the level of business benefit that had been promised and sought, and other business/technology trends such as customer relationship management and e-business have yielded disappointing, even negative returns.
This means the entire premise of IT is being called into question, and as one immediate consequence the boardroom is getting more involved in the business end of IT decisions.
Budgets are down sharply, and IT is being told to do more with less, by now a familiar mantra to CIOs, especially when it comes to new infrastructure projects.
Marc Scheepbouwer, CEO, Global Technology Business Intelligence
IT`s empire has been eroded, its power and ability unilaterally to make investments running into the hundreds of millions sharply curtailed.
Budgets have been slashed, a function of the disappointment with IT and the overall state of the economy. Budgets are down sharply, and IT is being told to do more with less, by now a familiar mantra to CIOs, especially when it comes to new infrastructure projects.
I thought I`d list a few of the issues CIOs tell me they are wrestling with and that keep them awake at night:
* The first is orientation between strategy and execution. There can be no doubt that the biggest disappointment with IT to date has been its inability to link directly to and support the goals of the business - in effect, to fulfil against the overall mandate of the organisation. This is not necessarily the fault of IT alone, but it does indicate that business has failed to correlate overall direction with IT, when this was IT`s original reason for existence.
* The second is IT`s ability to support the requirement for enhanced transparency in the business. Internal and external stakeholders today demand that the business be as transparent as possible: so much so that no questions can be asked in terms of governance and answerability. This is a tall order given the inability of current IT systems to support such an approach. They cannot do it as, by and large, existing IT systems are fragmented and disparate and hinder the single view of data, processes, customers and risk.
* The third is the need to assist the organisation in identifying, managing and monitoring key performance indicators in such a way that the boardroom has its finger permanently and consistently on the pulse of the business, with the ability to respond quickly, accurately and seamlessly to internal, external and regulatory changes. These issues have typically been the preserve of executives, but they have now fallen foursquare into the mandate of the CIO. As one CIO commented to me recently: "If I can`t fulfil all these requirements, the board will simply find someone else who can."
* The fourth is to ensure all of these functions are delivered via the Internet. Organisations that are widely dispersed - as most multinationals are - need to be able to coordinate, monitor and report on their key activities across the Web in a seamless, secure and trustworthy way, irrespective of time zones or other geographic requirements. Web-based applications are the norm, and business today simply cannot contemplate the deployment of new applications that do not meet this requirement.
* The fifth is to assist the organisation in reducing the manpower deployed against the activities listed above. There is tremendous pressure on business today to reduce headcount, or not to increase it, despite the need for tighter controls and greater functionality in the strategic planning and execution lifecycle. One answer is to automate much of what is currently done manually, supported by the appropriate technology.
Much of the above can be fulfilled by the fledgling technology/business initiative called business performance management, or BPM. As I`ve mentioned in previous Industry Insights, this builds on the foundation of business intelligence that many large organisations have laid, and can act as the missing link between strategy and execution.
It`s not a silver bullet, but BPM is one more step in the vital journey towards aligning IT with the goals of the business.
And ensuring CIOs can sleep soundly at night.
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