Asking IT the right questions for savings in the right space

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/service-oriented/corporate-directors-were-in-the-dark-about-it/6822

Now a new survey of 204 corporate board members finds that almost half (47%) of corporate directors surveyed are dissatisfied with their boards’ ability to provide information technology (IT) risk oversight. A recent survey from Oliver Wyman and the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) finds that, while virtually all board members acknowledge that IT will have a significant business impact on the companies they govern over the next five years, more than half, 51%, say they are not given enough information to perform their oversight duties effectively.

Not knowing enough about IT is a huge knowledge gap for the directors responsible for steering companies through today’s hyper-competitive global economy. Companies rely on information technology to squeeze
costs, streamline processes, leapfrog competitors, and even transform the business.

An interesting article talking about risk management, I wonder how much of this is about lack of effective investment and transparency both in operational issues and IT spend? How much as a percentage of the IT spend is as a result of keeping the lights on, and can we attribute those costs to a range of specific applications or services, or even one range of systems?

Linked to this though is understanding both IT costs, understanding how to play the IT game and explaining the corporate attitude to risk, and translating that into policy, on a simple level if the pc breaks do we fix it or replace it, if our 8 year old server breaks what is the policy a time and parts spend with the vendor? We need projects not only to be upgrading and renewing hardware, operating systems and middleware applications, but also to be analyzing infrastructure identifying savings and looking at what is being missed. Even simple things like going around the data centers and identifying the older kit, the systems switched off and getting them unracked can give the data center teams space to renew the data center, move things around to re-balance air flow and power distribution.

Start on the operational basics whilst working on the enterprise strategies and everything else will follow, it should be a self fulfilling project, the hardware refresh project will force operating system upgrades as the newer boxes work with newer operating systems, which might move storage to the new array allowing us to decommission the old ones. One project can make crucial savings across the IT landscape.

My view, as ‘irrelevant’ as the topic might seem to the board, but they often aren’t getting the feedback that they require or are not asking the right questions, crucially no one from the board has ever ‘logged a call and said can I have a server please, or can I have a recycled pc’. Therefore they don’t see the paperwork the back end non technical organizational issues involved, they don’t see that Mike’s manager wont sign off a new pc as he wants to save the £300 and therefore makes Mike wait five months for a recycled pc without considering the productivity or marginal cost of his time and the time in supporting a legacy pc. In the server space, they might see the savings in the hardware support contract being canceled but not realize the translation of those costs to having your engineers spend time on the phone with vendors discussing part numbers, co-ordinating parts collection and delivery, even courier handling.

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