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Creating business value is the ultimate goal of investment in new IT technologies. This paper offers vital recommendations to both IT vendors and IT users on how to ensure that the value gained is not overwhelmed by the growing cost of managing these technologies.
Advances in computing and networking technology have given rise to significant increases in productivity, as well as new products, new businesses, and new business models. These same advances have also fueled an explosion in complexity in an environment where IT-based processes are increasingly urgent and critical. More than just a problem to be solved, this collision of complexity and urgency represents a new way of the world, a new environment that must be managed in new ways. Both vendors and users of information technologies must make adjustments. On the vendor side, in addition to the perennial task of quality improvement, a new emphasis is required on automation tailored to applications and on integrated testing and validation. On the user side, the best way to manage the difficult interplay of complexity and urgency is for management and IT organizations to continue to explicitly tie IT investment to the business value it provides.
The Collision of Complexity and Urgency
In the early days of any new technological era, speculation and even fantasy thrive. Remember the paperless office? Or the regiments of robots freeing us all from drudgery of every kind? How about the imminent disappearance of brick-and-mortar businesses? All of these speculations have turned out to be wrong, one way or another. Nevertheless, the reality of the changes brought about by computing and networking technologies has been no less astonishing and fantastic. Over the past decade or so, IT advances have fueled an explosion in business productivity. The impact on the top line has been equally dramatic ? many new kinds of businesses, new kinds of products and entirely new ways of doing business have appeared as a result of the tremendous rate of innovation in networking and computing infrastructure and software.
The accelerating push toward open, non-proprietary systems that can inter-operate through standards-based protocols has only accelerated the trend. The ability to mix and match best-of-breed technologies or to build effective lower-cost solutions has been a boon to business, allowing the implementation of new technologies in ways that align with business goals and achieve good returns on investment.
These same advances in information technology and tremendous increase in flexibility have also fueled an explosion in complexity. The flexibility of open systems means that many new combinations of hardware and software systems become possible, with myriad new potential interactions among them and between them and the business processes they support. Information technology has exploded in space as well. Once the domain of a few specialists in the data center that carried out a few critical, but narrow tasks, today computing and networking technologies directly touch every individual in the organization and support almost every major and minor function. IT components are now distributed throughout the enterprise, from an expanded data center to individual departments and offices to branch locations and even to individual employees using mobile technologies. The result: a large, diverse, strongly interacting system of distributed technologies that create tremendous management complexity at the same time that they free business to achieve new levels of productivity.
To make the difficulties more acute, this complexity is growing within an environment of increasing urgency because of the ever more critical nature of business IT systems. Recent years have given us all a heightened awareness of the risks of both natural disasters and human malfeasance. Pressures are rising from the need to comply with regulations like HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley. Add in relentless competitive pressures and there is an ever-increasing drive for higher availability, greater robustness, and faster reactions. Business simply cannot afford for IT systems, and more importantly, the business processes built on them, to be unavailable or not working properly. Downtime and malfunction can cost from thousands to millions of dollars per hour, and can wreak havoc with a company's core business processes, potentially even threatening the viability of the company.
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