It's time for companies to stop wasting time.
Flexibility, speed and expertise. That's what separates leaders from laggards in our Facebook, iPhone, tweet-driven world.
How quickly can you respond to a trend that punched its way overnight into the mainstream? How ready are you to launch a service in the cloud that will be tweaked within a week, by you or your customers? How fast can you unleash employee productivity by hooking up their mobile gadgets to your business network?
It's no secret that client expectations are increasing when it comes to IT. The challenge? Information Technology (IT) departments are strapped for time, resources and skills as they wrestle with just trying to keep all the plates they juggle up in the air at once.
The CIOs I talk with describe the avalanche of projects they face. Almost three quarters of the CIOs say they are investing in mobile deployments this year, of which one-third of those will be deployed in a cloud. However, 70 percent of their budgets, on average, are still spent on maintenance and 34 percent of their projects are late. It's a vicious cycle.
To be sure, CIOs are constantly juggling resources to try and make everyone happy and deliver the results their organizations need. But these efforts aren't sustainable. And it is why we are rethinking how we are looking at enterprise technology so we can help address these challenges.
We're entering a new era of computing.
One where companies will plug in intelligent, integrated systems. One where the tightly integrated systems will be hard-wired with knowledge, based upon the best practices of thousands of successful projects so that manual IT tasks that used to require human intervention are now handled automatically. Systems like this will solve the manual tasks that occupy so much of an IT managers life and free them to focus on innovation and what sets a company apart from its competition.
With new expert, integrated systems now coming to market, the question becomes: how can corporate IT departments take advantage of this knowledge? If much of the manual and more administrative tasks of IT are being handled by the systems themselves, an IT department would be silly not to embrace this and focus their energies elsewhere.
Everyone knows there isn't a shortage of skills in technology these days. These new systems give IT departments the opportunity to focus on the work that will make a noticeable difference for their company and their customers.
To find out more about Expert Integrated Systems and a smarter planet, click here.
Anyone who has acquired the coveted title of CIO knows that it is just a TLA which means "Career Is Over."
"If much of the manual and more administrative tasks of IT are being handled by the systems themselves, an IT department would be silly not to embrace this and focus their energies elsewhere."
Such as the unemployment line where other former IT workers also stand and wonder what happened to them.
All of humanity doesn't move at the same pace and that is a fact that younger generations seem to ignore as they also ignore the fact that they, too, will one day be replaced by a "system" that can do a job better then they can. That retirement home on the golf course next to the beach too frequently becomes a nursing home with the latest technology watching and monitoring every move of the inhabitants.
But life goes on, just not in the same bodies.
I also get a little nervous when one of the major suppliers of a new technology is at the same time trying to convince me that this is the next "New Big Thing". I intend no criticism of IBM here. I just keep remembering empty spaces on world ocean maps of the past, which were identified with the phrase "Here there be monsters".
The projects are late because either sales people promise more than can be delivered in the allotted time or the developers themselves sell themselves as Einsteins or Super Heroes when they are neither. The huge maintenance figures occur because of sloppy work or inadequate specs in creating the original end-product.
An old estimating tool is: take the original estimate for a project, multiply the time and multiply it by two and go to the next unit of measure. So, a project that is estimated to take one day will actually take two weeks ---- before urgent patches are required and maintenance sets in.