Many of you have finished your personal resolutions. Perhaps it's time, if you haven't done so already, to resolve your IT priorities for this year. At ZDNet Tech Update, we've narrowed the priorities list to seven issues that we believe should be the driving forces behind your IT strategy for 2002 -- and the remainder of this decade. These are the underlying themes that will cut across all of your major initiatives. They are: vertical integration, mobility, open standards, total cost of ownership (TCO), availability, scalability, and security.
For the foreseeable future, virtually all developments in business technology products and services will be connected with one or more of these issues. While there's no particular order to the seven issues in terms of priority, vertical integration and mobility stand out as the two that shape the entire list as well as the way you should be thinking about all the issues. These two issues, and the challenges they represent, are best embodied by customers, suppliers, and other external constituencies within your "vertical" who want access to information anytime, anywhere, and on any device.
The device problem is particularly troubling for technology decision-makers. In the past, you had some measure of control over the type of terminal used by those requiring access to your systems. For internal constituents (such as delivery personnel), you could set the standard for what sort of device and wireless network everyone would use. For those of you who still have this luxury, we will continue our on-going analyses of these devices, their operating systems, and the wireless networks to which they they connect.
But now, external constituents such as customers want and expect access to the information as well. They also have this annoying attitude that, sure, you can change their chosen mobile device -- after you've pried it from their dead fingers. They are accustomed to accessing information on their terms. Ask them to conform to your standards and they'll take their business elsewhere.
Standards will yield several benefits
This problem suggests the pursuit of a highly standards-based strategy (one of the other seven issues) across as much of your IT as possible. Judicious deployment of standards yields several benefits. First, it takes some of the worry out of integrating your systems via networks and to devices and other systems over which you have no control. Second, it affords you the highest degree of flexibility should you become dissatisfied with one particular solution. In terms of mobility and vertical integration, networking, data structure, and presentation standards should reign supreme. So too should the solutions that embrace them -- with minimal proprietary extensions. For example, liberal implementation of some or all Web services standards (XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI) will greatly ease the path towards rebuilding your applications as services.
Deploying standards wherever possible will help you address another of the seven critical issues: the total cost of running your technology. By the end of this decade, technology will take up the lion's share of your company's annual operating budget. Some estimates put technology's slice of the pie at 50 percent. With that much at stake, you'll want to make sure things are set up in a way that puts you, and not your technology provider, in control of your technology expenses.
The minute your company starts to rely on a proprietary technology to solve a particular problem, the provider of that technology controls not only the speed and reliability of your solution, but also its cost. This problem was most evident last year when Microsoft decided to change some of its licensing policies. (The change was positive for some, negative for others.) Although Microsoft's products support standards, most of its products also have proprietary features that provide additional benefits. When Microsoft announced plans to change its licensing scheme, the customers that depended heavily on those proprietary features suddenly realised who was in control of that portion of their IT costs.
Taking back control of your IT costs requires reducing your dependency on proprietary features in favour of standards. For example, base your directory services on LDAP and resist the temptation to take advantage of proprietary extensions offered in some solutions. This way, if you don't like your current LDAP directory because it's too slow or because the provider is charging too much, you can more easily replace it with one that is faster, cheaper, or more reliable.
Of course, just because a standards-setting body says something is a standard doesn't really mean it is. And just because no standards setting body ever anointed something else as a standard doesn't mean it isn't. Deciding what is and isn't a standard is an entirely separate issue for a future column.
Making decisions that have a strategic impact on your TCO doesn't stop with the cost of the technology itself. In the case of desktop systems and handhelds, it doesn't even start there. As a side note, we can't think of one good reason (except for specific applications) to buy desktop systems instead of notebooks.
Page 2 discusses the remaining strategic issues of availability, scalability and security.
