Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
CIOUpdate’s financial strategies section helps CIOs make the most of their enterprise’s time, money and talent.
by Max Staines of Compass Management Consulting Rural sourcing, where U.S.-based service providers establish delivery centers in low-cost regions outside of major metropolitan areas, is gaining increasing interest and attention in the marketplace. Potential benefits of rural sourcing can include competitive pricing, fewer time-zone and cultural constraints, and, in many cases, lower transition costs. Moreover,…
by Bill Blausey, SVP and CIO of Eaton Corp. Green IT is without question one of the one of the most sweeping trends in IT today. The industry enthusiasm isn’t hard to explain. The recent recession and its after effects, along with rising energy costs, have made reducing capital and operating expenditures a higher priority…
Because of the continuous ebb and flow of business today, software licensing is just one of those things in IT that never seems to get under control. Cloud, outsourcing, the comings and goings of employees leaves IT managers in an expensive bind when it comes time to pony up and pay the tab for overages…
Much ado is made about the cost savings, profits and agility to be found in the cloud. But whether that is so depends heavily on how service level agreements (SLA) are written. A clause can reach out and seize the savings. A phrase can rob you of anything beyond the faintest resemblance of agility and…
By Max Staines of Compass Management Consulting Discussions of cloud computing benefits often turn to the virtues of dynamic, usage based pricing where IT resources are delivered on-demand to customers in response to changing business requirements. Users pay only for what they consume, and don’t have to worry about insufficient capacity or idle resources. The…
Measurement and pricing issues Benchmarking is essential to promote internal comparison and competition and to quantify both the impact of constraints, as well as the “size of the prize” in terms of the potential improvement opportunity. In this context, benchmarking becomes much more than a discrete, tactical exercise focused on pricing of a particular service….
The cloud is changing much about how IT is done. But has it changed or possibly even eliminated the need for offshore outsourcing? In the short term, the answer is no. That’s mostly because the cloud is not yet in full play. However, given the current momentum behind the cloud, change is inevitable and the…
By Rob Prinzo of The Prinzo Group It is time to face reality. The spending cuts caused by the recession have lead to gaps between your enterprise software applications and the most current releases. The longer you wait to upgrade, the larger the gap, the larger the gap, the bigger the project. Although most organizations…
There has been quite a few arguments in trying to prove or debunk that ITIL can produce any kind of ROI. The pragmatic answer is: Yes it can, but not as easy as ITIL guidance can hope for. Let’s step back and define what ITIL is. A simplistic view is that ITIL is a set…
I admit it: I’ve always hated the term business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR). It just sounds so broad and like spending money in case something bad happens. And it always comes wrapped with technical terms like “recovery point objectives,” “failover SLA’s,” and “OS compatibility.” Frankly, all those technical terms just don’t resonate with me. What does…