Third Of Organisations Lack IT Infrastructure To Meet Business Needs
Denise Plumpton, 25/03/2010, posted in "Analysis"
Denise Plumpton is a non-executive director for 360°IT, advising on both strategy and content. She has unparalleled insight into the issues that matter to today's business IT leaders, having ...more info
Denise Plumpton is a non-executive director for 360°IT, advising on both strategy and content. She has unparalleled insight into the issues that matter to today's business IT leaders, having previously been director of information at the Highways Agency, CIO at Powergen and IT director with TNT UK. She currently also holds non-exec positions at Centro and The Heart of Birmingham Teaching Primary Care Trust. Denise's reputation for leading strategic change and bringing IT closer to the business is renowned. Having worked with IT departments of all sizes, her experience spans resourcing, outsourcing, insourcing, changing suppliers, rightsizing and downsizing. More recently, at the Highways Agency (HA), she recruited and developed an in-house team of IT professionals in programme/project management and business analysis. While at the HA, she also transformed the provision of traffic information to the public, media and industry bodies, as well as bringing together a whole range of infrastructure services into a single managed service contract. ...less info
A third of organisations do not have an integrated IT infrastructure that can deliver what the business needs according to a poll from my company. The majority of organisations (52%) have what they need for now, but only 15% have an IT infrastructure that is sufficiently flexible to meet their changing needs.
The important challenge is to ensure you have an integrated infrastructure that can deliver what the business needs now, yet is sufficiently flexible to meet your (inevitably) changing needs.
The IT Manager’s most important responsibility is to have a clear idea of what the business needs and the scope of any future project or programme. They also need to be able to communicate this to suppliers effectively if those suppliers are to stand a fighting chance of putting forward a suitable proposal.
No supplier I’ve met has yet managed to demonstrate clearly how the various products and services they’re showing me actually integrate with one another. Worse, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked enough detail about what I have in place for the supplier to be able to show me how these offerings will work with my existing systems and services.
The usual response from suppliers is that we just aren’t structured to approach deals in an integrated way. The account manager is targeted on sales and has a portfolio of products/services to offer.
The product managers are focused on developing and promoting their particular product to the exclusion of (and sometimes in conflict with) other products from the same supplier. I can see this is a simple, well-tested way to structure your operations – but it’s no longer effective given customers’ changing needs, demands and processes.
My message to fellow IT managers and CIOs is to do our bit to improve things and think about what we’re buying. For suppliers it is to take a look at the business structure of the organisations you hope to serve and aim to match it. You just might see a big improvement in your order book.
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