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For many IT departments, 2009 is turning out to be the year they're doing more with less. At more, with a lot less. With a lot more uncertainty. I believe that there's going to be more pressure on organizations and on IT organizations than we've ever seen.
But that doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities, and perhaps they are the opportunities that we'd choose, but I believe there's an option here for some companies to turn a the crisis into an opportunity to reexamine what they're doing and look for new opportunities. I think the organizations that are willing to work and take risks now, will be the ones gaining benefits down the road.
To help stimulate a discussion (if not the economy), it's worth calling out a few ways in which organizations can manage (or even reduce) IT costs while retaining (or even increasing) functionality.
One of the first ways is to make sure you're working more closely with the business--when it comes to everything from application development to maintenance to governance. In fact, you can start by stopping--it's a good time to clear the decks and realign priorities and value to the new economic landscape. Start by working more closely with business leaders, sharing the projects you currently have, and their priorities, and then work with business leaders to determine which ones are most critical.
One potentially practical tip for stepping back and savings some resources or money might be in temporarily (depending on business requirements) agreeing to reduce services levels, for example, on select systems or applications. Perhaps an organization could reduce service levels by increasing the amount of time the help desk has to respond to requests (say from 2 hours to 4 hours) or lengthening the amount of time IT has after a disaster to get systems (or selected systems) back on line.
Of course, any changes like these have to be a joint decision with the business. Nevertheless, it's a good idea for all IT groups to take a step back and make look for opportunities to save or cut back on resources and spending where they can--as long as those cuts or savings are aligned with business needs.
Okay, okay, so SOA isn't easy. And no one (well, perhaps auditors, governments or shareholders) like compliance. But good compliance can make SOA easier to implement--at least that the gist of Jaimin Patel's article in Computer Technology Review. Patel, director of business development at WebLayers, a company that focuses on automating SOA, Mainframe and SDLC governance, makes a number of good points in his recent article on "Breaking Down the Barriers to Compliance through SOA."
In fact, you have to like his opening paragraph--
"Why is it that when we hear the word compliance we tense up anticipating that we've done or are about to do something wrong? Perhaps it's the widespread misperception of the role that compliance plays in the organization. Or maybe it's because we've experienced challenging or even unsuccessful attempts at enforcing compliance at various levels in the company."
In my experience, compliance does make people tense up--it make both IT and business people cringe a little. Often times talking about compliance is like someone running their fingernails down a chalkboard--it's jarring, and instantly your mind turns to other things you would like to be doing, or other places you'd like to be.
But Patel's point in the article isn't just that compliance is unpleasant--it's that compliance may actually be easier than you think. From his perspective, if done right, there's no need to actually tense up after hearing the word compliance. No need to protect your ears from the chalkboard sound.
Instead, he argues, a SOA infrastructure can actually be the enabling connection between IT and business:
"Successful organizations will tell you that the speed and efficiency of implementing and enforcing compliance is directly proportional to the health of their IT infrastructure. Ideally, a standards-based service oriented architecture (SOA) can be the bridge that enables IT to meet business goals. In this case, the goal is compliance.
With SOA as the foundation, a company can move from a weak IT infrastructure that doesn't support business goals to an organization that has a more flexible architecture that ensures adherence to regulations and policies required by both internal and external forces."
Okay--so that doesn't necessarily mean that SOA (or compliance) is easy--but he does make a good point that when an organization has a strategy plan that encompasses SOA and compliance, they can work synergistically to enable each other. The end result? A far better connection between business and IT, and corporate goals that are being met, instead of being ignored.
"By driving compliance and governance across lines of business through an SOA, companies can ensure greater consistency and reuse of best practices. These capabilities become increasingly more important as the SOA evolves and new policies are introduced.
Ensuring a successful governance solution requires analysis, tracking, and improvement of enterprise policies and architecture as a company's initiatives change and evolve. A policy-based approach to SOA governance will help establish strong auditing and conformance mechanisms that limit corporate liabilities, ensure business continuity, and reduce integration costs and complexities."
In his blog, The IT Governance Evangelist Steve Romero from CA brings up a great point about decision-making. From his perspective, decision making is the heart and soul of IT governance.
"What decisions are made, who makes them, and how, are the essence of Governance."
And now that the economy is significantly tougher than it's been in recent memory, most corporate decisions are more critical than they've ever been. To help organizations make better decisions, Romero has come up with a couple rules for rational decision making:
- First, be clear on the objective.
- Second, be sure you can measure the result of your decision.
Of course, in his blog, he goes into the details for each point. Suffice to say that if you can't answer either one appropriately, you're not going to have a governable solution!
Before you take the leap into a new enterprise resource planning system, it’s wise to look closely at your current systems and information technology (IT) environment, business needs, and vendor options.
According to a September 2002 report by the Center for Studying Health System Change, healthcare costs for privately insured Americans jumped 10% in 2001-the first double-digit increase in more than a decade. Rapidly rising healthcare costs also drove an average 15% increase in the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance in 2002, forcing many organizations to make managing healthcare costs a top priority.
Microsoft Corp. is finding it can help control those rising costs with MicrosoftHealth, a healthcare portal for U.S.-based workers that's designed to make employees and dependents better informed and more empowered as medical consumers. That, in turn, reduces healthcare costs by keeping users healthier and reducing unnecessary physician office visits. The portal also cuts mailing costs, since enrollees can access information online. Looking forward, it will provide a flexible infrastructure for further integration with healthcare providers, claims processors, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and benefit programs like disease management services.
Media and entertainment companies use technology to deliver digital content to an increasingly multichannel world.
For companies involved in the media and entertainment world, the shift from physical media such as videotapes to digital distribution, where content can be sent around the world in seconds, promises far greater efficiencies. It also raises a host of issues like digital rights management, security, and interoperability concerns.
Over the past few years, IT services giant Unisys has embarked on one of the most extensive makeovers in the industry, refocusing itself from a hardware-oriented company to one focused on services and solutions.
At the same time, Unisys has also transformed its IT infrastructure. The company has reduced the total number of applications in its portfolio by 35 percent, decreased its server footprint by 50 percent through virtualization, increased its use of off-the-shelf applications to 60 percent, and achieved costs per end user that are 30 percent lower than comparable organizations.
But one area that had eluded Unisys’ transformation was critical to its future profitability—the area of resource management and professional service automation (PSA), including project setup, budget and funding, online resource requests, résumé searches, assigning resources to projects, and more. With about 22,000 employees in billable jobs, Unisys had to make sure its consultants focused and executed efficiently.
Your IT staff may get excited about the nuts and bolts of a new software release, but the ultimate success of an upgrade is based on the benefit it delivers to the business. Profit took a look at Oracle's new database—Oracle Database 11g—to get an executive's take on it. Here are five ways it will benefit your enterprise:
Protect and manage unstructured data. Unstructured data—the volumes of information stored outside the database—is the fastest-growing type of enterprise data. From XML datatypes to geospatial objects, organizations are storing and managing more large data files—without the added protection, security, and management capabilities associated with traditional database solutions.
Oracle SecureFiles, a new feature in Oracle Database 11g, allows you to deliver this information from the database with the same speed and performance of a file system. But SecureFiles allows you to compress (for reduced storage requirements), encrypt, (for greater security) and deduplicate (for greater information accuracy) this data. By moving unstructured data into databases, you can better track and secure important data that is currently spread around your enterprise.
"We think this is the last remaining piece to really help nudge customers to move more and more of their high-value business documents out of file systems into databases, and get all the benefits of a database—the reliability, availability, security," says Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle's senior vice president of database server technologies. "It makes it easier for them to deal with their auditors who are always auditing them against compliance requirements."
India is handling red-hot growth with real business intelligence.
India was everywhere at the Davos World Economic Forum earlier this year, as Indian executives and government officials used the event to promote India's position as the fastest-growing democratic economy in the world. Beyond its borders, the country is sometimes seen as an immense and exotic land. For many consumers, it's also the voice on the other end of the phone when they call technical support for their computers, telephones, or television sets.
But call centers are far from the only area that Indian businesses are focused on. Businesspeople who are paying attention know that India's best years are still ahead, and opportunities are there for the taking.