Bladewatch.com

http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=19745

A study by the Cass Business School and ea Consulting Group has found that communication failures and cultural differences between IT departments and business units within the UK’s leading banks are hampering the industry’s strategic development and business effectiveness.

Twenty five senior managers across 24 UK firms, including nearly all major UK retail banks, were interviewed for the research. It found that financial services firms are being held back and not realising strategic level advantages due to the way in which project portfolios are being managed.

In many cases, the IT department was the only area within a business that had complete visibility of the project portfolio due to the heavy requirement for technology in almost all project tasks. Consequently, IT departments were often the only part of the business able to make decisions on the priority of projects and the allocation of resources.

It’s right but then if is it not a result of being business driven rather than IT service driven. By that I mean, would IT not choose to do things differently in terms of billing and delivery? That I might have a ‘production line’, a line of pre-provisioned servers so that when Mike from accounts turns up, there’s no provision, no analysis of server specifications and what’s currently available, it’s server12990 from blade enclosure 17 or one of the many 1u Dell or HP specials. All Mike has to do is buy the Emulex cards if he needs storage.

The challenge being a degree of control, of budget and trust, if we really want to deliver, we need to look a virtualization and pre-provisioning/on demand provisioning to end the 4-6 weeks it can take for a physical server. We need to switch to the small/medium/large configurations that are pre-approved, if your requirements fit within that, you get it in hours or days. How we do this will depend on the way you do business and IT, whether you see IT as a component of the business which delivers you service, or if it’s an integral part of your business – that your IT is your business. My favourite example I had recently when chatting with a manager was that they had a Dell 3u server, it was 8 years old, but earnt the company £100,000 a year, every time it went down, it cost the business £500 a day in revenue. There was a lack of understanding that from a revenue standpoint it may cost £3000 a year in outage, an acceptable cost, but what revenues could we achieve without the outage? With a new server, could it process more transactions and reduce downtime? Could that server be the reason your business isn’t performing as well and not IT’s deliver?

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