Keep the work local and spend the extra money or send it overseas and get near the same value at a lower price? For many budget-conscious CIOs, the latter makes sense. But that doesn’t mean offshoring isn't a panacea for cost-constrained IT department; it can involve risks and potential long-term downfalls when it comes to business agility and innovation.
Many IT departments perform software development projects with a focus on delivering software with required functionality by a certain time and for the benefit of business. Unfortunately, this focus for such projects is wrong.
Critical IT staffing shortages will put many businesses at risk in the next few years if immediate steps are not taken to change current workforce planning models.
"I'm so done with alignment," declared the CIO pacing across the stage at our CIO Perspectives New York event a few weeks ago. "It's not even part of the conversation anymore. IT and the business are in this together. Period."
Getting maximum results from innovative IT investments is an art. Business users may need incentives to take advantage of new capabilities that wait to be exploited.
Various frameworks can help change how an organisation perceives — and more importantly, measures — value. Change, however, is the key word.
The ongoing issue with the value debate is its subjectivity; value is a perceptive judgement that must, by necessity of a business case, be quantified, particularly when each project must be signed off by the chief financial officer. And therein lies the problem, says Capability Management partner, Vince Gill.
NSW government-owned energy supplier, Country Energy, has entered into a managed print services contract with HP to reduce time spent by IT staff managing printers by as much as 95 per cent. Country Energy has 4525 staff and 169 offices across New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. It has about 800,000 customers. Alan Montgomery, group manager for business services at Country Energy, said back in 2007 about 31 IT staff serviced some 800 printers at the utility.
For years, going back to the days of data centers, people in technology thought their first priority was to make sure the computer systems were operational. Key statistics focused on uptime-making sure the servers, networks and applications were functioning. Meeting such targets was considered success.
Until now, CIOs have been flying blind when it comes to empirical, comparable evidence of how the market views IT investments by publicly listed organisations. But new research changes that. From Hindsight to Knowledge — the power in knowing the past when investing in the future, looks at the market's assessment of the returns to IT investments in Australia.