Continuing the IT investment

http://www.bmc.com/en-GB/news/press-releases/2009/important-new-research-IT-innovators.html

LONDON, September 2, 2009 — Businesses that continue to invest in IT are better positioned to weather the economic downturn, and will be better equipped to capitalize on any future economic recovery, according to a new survey of 300 European enterprise IT decision makers and research from the London School of Economics (LSE).

Results of the 2009 European IT Survey 1, sponsored by BMC Software (NYSE: BMC), reveal that one in four companies – the Thrivers — are beating the recession by focusing on improving their IT organization’s operational efficiency and reinvesting those cost savings into strategic IT projects that drive new business. Many of the surveyed CIOs highlighted their belief that sustained IT investment is strongly linked to overall business performance.

The survey also reflected interesting differences between the approaches to IT investment and innovation in the three countries. For example, German companies are the most consistent in their approach to innovation. They typically spend 24 percent of their IT budgets on innovation with a drop in spend of only 8 percent on average. In comparison, French companies are the most cautious; with innovation spend decreasing by 17 percent in the downturn. The UK has the most enthusiastic sentiment towards innovation, with 67 percent prioritizing innovation and 77 percent innovating in good and bad times.

An interesting article from BMC. To be the leader in your field you need your applications available, have everything set up ready for business. Priorities therefore should be in eliminating the barriers to entry, the time it takes to set up a new user, the issues surrounding inventory/patch management and application support, so that your teams have the tools they need to quickly and effectively recognize and issue and resolve it. Of course we need to be proactive, preventing issues before they happen, but first of all, we need to work on identifying the applications and systems, identifying typical issues, understanding and sharing their resolution, and then moving towards a permanent fix.

In terms of innovation, we need to be innovating to new solutions, new platforms but we also need to have ‘retrospective innovation’, looking at what we have and making it the best that it can be. That the Windows 2000 servers are brought up to spec with the latest drivers/firmware, with the page file, services and the configruation all optimized. That the way we build a server, or deploy an application though manual or scripted is done in the best way possible at the least marginal cost, the phrase I’ve used before stabilizing the core. That you have NT servers need not be a problem, technically yes it’s out of support and theefore a risk. But optimized, simple tasks like disk space, drivers, turning off services that aren’t needed, defragmenting the file system, setting the network card to 100/full, or tuning your monitoring can change your high maintenance platform to one that’s an issue, but operationally acceptable.

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