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I was reading an interview with a CEO talking about his growing business, about how much investment they were making in their IT. The company shall remain nameless (that’s immaterial), it raised a few thoughts:

• How do we measure success in our IT – our IT budget, meeting SLA’s or that it works for the end user – the number of emails/quotes saying “IT IS RUBBISH”
• When we say our investment in or spending on IT – what do we mean? Is this support (keeping everything online) or investment (buying newer more efficient and resilient systems)
• How does this link to your corporate social responsibility?
• What range of smart (efficient) technologies are being used to deliver IT – are we concerned with cost, empowerment or the environmental aspect?

A few thoughts, I could be at this point be accused of being overly specifc, but is it not more important that we uphold IT to the same standards as we would ‘the business’ the service but at the same time be prepared to invest and support it as we would any other department? By that I mean how do I measure my IT’s ability to deliver and how can I continue improving and innovating not only the technology, but the way we do business whilst managing or reducing the operating costs? Does it not require a reboot of the way I do business? Do I really need everyone working on site? Does every user need their own ‘work computer’, could I not give the user a citrix based web portal, a usb stick with an image? If we want to transform what we get from our IT either in terms of number of calls processed, how many failures we have or how fast an application is, do we not need to focus on the supply chain, the big picture? To understand as a business the following:

For each department/business role what is it that they need from IT?

Do HR need desktops, or do they need effectively gmail, access to their HR applications and functions, and their training tools?

What does a typical user need and what different service level agreements, performance and scalability does each usergroup need?

Should I be focussing on deploying a cross business common platform for business and one for the front line business revenue generating part? One common IT which all users use and work from, with different specific groups being given priority in terms of availability or scale dependent on need. Can I take that dual core desktop we’re buying, and take one core and allocate it to our grid?

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