Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
This series of five articles takes a closer look at software development, the reasons for failure and how to avoid them. For project success, it is best to involve users early in the testing process and continue to engage users until it is time to go live. In theory, once the software has been built…
The economic downturn has had a significant impact on IT spending, particularly in certain sectors. According to new EMA research, 2009 budgets in the education, retail, manufacturing, and banking/finance sectors are all down between 15% and 35% over Q1 of 2008. January and February 2009 IT dollars show a continuation of this decline in spending,…
Despite the overall decline in IT spending, companies are still investing in technologies that help control costs and enable businesses to work smarter. This according to an Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) report, At the Edge of the Storm: IT Investments from Jan/08 through Feb/09. The findings suggest that while IT spending overall is on the…
In the fully managed model, you don’t own the equipment. You are paying for someone else to take on the costs for technology refresh and the expertise to manage and monitor the systems. The physical environment is owned and operated by the service provider. You don’t have a staff of hardware engineers and you don’t…
Business service management (BSM) is a relatively new term in the IT management community. Over the last few years it has become a sort of buzzword – many vendors are adopting the term and using it to market their products and services. The average executive is now inundated with vendors and products all claiming to…
It is well-known that as software projects grow in size, their probability of failure escalates dramatically. (For our purposes here, “failure” means failing to meet its objective, either by being scrapped, or by the goals being substantially scaled back. A lesser form of failure is when the project drags out far beyond its original time…
Here’s what the vendors say … One vendor says that “BSM is all about managing the health of services.” A third focuses on “real-time service health and integrity.” Telecomm service providers have known for decades that five-nines of availability in the data center or central office is meaningless if the customer doesn’t have dial tone…
This category of outsourcing adds “ping, power, & pipe” services to the in-house managed model. The service provider offers colocation by providing space, power and a link to the Internet for their customers’ servers. They do not perform maintenance or troubleshooting. The only provide a rack to house the servers and a repetitive test to…
Fear can come in many forms. Sometimes it comes from a loud noise, or else from a scary image – I just heard about a pharmaceutical company trying to get college students to respond to the picture of a spider with fear by giving them electric shocks (they wanted to test medication that could help…
This category of outsourcing is probably the least costly because what you’re paying for is remote expertise. In this model, you own the equipment and physical environment it sits in. What you don’t have is a bunch of hardware engineers on your staff. You get those experts sitting at your partner’s site. In this environment,…