Giga Information Group: Squeexing IT
Cutbacks are nothing new, but this year's need for hard ROI will require an ingenious balancing act. This year, companies need to improve existing processes, not technology.
Marc Cecere
Vice President- Research Manager
Giga Information Group
Reducing growth in spending, which will drive IT to cut back and squeeze more value out of existing resources, will be critical for IT shops in 2002. This requires that all investments have a hard ROI, near-term payback, and a more rigorous assessment of costs, benefits and risks, resulting in projects in the following areas:
Consolidation and integration. Along with a reduced number of systems and increased centralisation of accountability of IT, this means investment in tools to integrate operational applications and data.
Automation. Project examples include human capital management systems to automate labour-intensive processes around recruitment and resource allocation, and storage systems to automate managing data based on corporate policies.
Client retention. Projects will be in CRM, data analysis, and profiling that attempt to manage, understand, and anticipate customer needs at a detailed level.
Knowledge sharing. Fewer people doing more, and the need to reduce loss of knowledge through turnover will lead to greater investment in sophisticated search, data categorisation, and data visualisation tools.
The need for greater security will drive all forms of security to be combined under one group. That group's increased importance will be seen by the addition of security architects as part of the core architecture team and the creation of a chief security officer, primarily with technology vendors.
With products, the emphasis will be less on cutting-edge technologies and more on improving existing processes, including implementing software patches, maintaining tight configuration control of servers, and injecting security reviews into project management processes.
