CIOs are wanting to be smarter with the way they use and provision technology

martin237 | November 18, 2011 | 0 Comments

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1369582

CIOs Plot a Path to the Future via Smarter Use of IT in 2012, Finds Oracle and PwC Report

Research finds 2012 priorities for Communications Service Providers include striking a better balance of in-house and outsourced IT and making better use of applications such as CRM

The findings are interesting and illustrate the challenges that face the CIO today. The main drivers from my standpoint are:

Do more with less
Reduce delivery times and the time to market – why does it take so long to deploy new infrastructure or redeploy old infrastructure
Reduce operational costs and change the business as usual to investment spend
Improve capacity planning and reduce ‘unexpected’ capacity issues, be more proactive
Look at where we spend money and can we do this more efficiently in-house or through our partners
Innovate our data center requirements, and utilise the right technologies for the right business needs

How do we achieve this?

Standard offerings to aid delivery times, to reduce support costs and complexity
Reduce complexity and build in resilience or the ability to scale – using common platforms, less complex architecture we can scale the solution once, deploy once and spend once, rather than trying to keep the lights on
Virtualize where possible – but turning it around to make virtualization the norm, abstracting the different infrastructure elements from the end user – why do you care what tin your application runs on, what should be key is delivery, scalability and disaster recovery functionality if applicable
Improved processes with transparency in costs, in delivery times and engagement processes – understand who we talk to get things done, and follow set processes that work to achieve this

Do check out the article. There are exciting and challenging times ahead, regardless the common message is doing more with less through reducing complexity and improving the agility of the infrastructure. This needs to be done not only through investment and renewal of the existing systems, but in establishing the right set of common tools, common processes and platforms to allow us to deliver common offerings that meet the cross business and cross region or market requirements, to be able to deliver on time, on budget to standards each time, every time.