Commentary
CIOs And Spring Cleaning
Given everything that's going on right now -- talk of recession, the presidential election, the baseball season starting up -- it's a good time for tech chiefs to take stock and do a little (or maybe a lot of) housekeeping. Here are a few thoughts.Given everything that's going on right now -- talk of recession, the presidential election, the baseball season starting up -- it's a good time for tech chiefs to take stock and do a little (or maybe a lot of) housekeeping. Here are a few thoughts.First, let me tip my hat to the people at Micro Focus, a vendor of application portfolio management tools. It was an e-mail the company's PR rep sent that inspired me to write this blog (guided, as I always am, by T.S. Eliot's famous dictum: Good artists imitate, great artists steal).
And so, here are my suggestions for IT spring cleaning, based mostly on conversations with CIOs and also some personal observation. Please add or subtract (in the comment field below) as you see fit.
More Global CIO Insights
White Papers
- Creating the Enterprise-Class Tablet Environment - by Yankee Group
- The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet's Good Bones - by BlackBerry
Reports
More >>Webcasts
- Maximize ROI with Database Consolidation onto Private Clouds
- Outsourcing Security: What Every Potential Cloud Security Customer Should Know
1) Inventory your applications and look to downsize. You know there are apps in your organization that you don't really need any more, that are sucking up valuable compute cycles and bandwidth, not to mention maintenance costs. Forget the if-it-ain't-broke reasoning: Money wasted is just that.
2) Make sure your resources are allocated correctly. And here I'm thinking of human resources, mainly. Are outsourcing contracts performing as they should? Do you really need those high-priced consultants? Look for alternatives: flex time, part time, domestic services organizations, retired IT workers. Alternatives are out there; tight times increase their number.
3) Look to technology to help. Server virtualization is a relatively straightforward fix that can help cut hardware costs almost right away. Software as a service is in the same category, but not as straightforward.
4) Be brutal. Just as you must force yourself to part with that broken squash racket and your favorite old jeans (now too tight) when doing spring cleaning at home, be disciplined and critical when looking at your IT architecture. "No pain, no gain" certainly applies here.
Don't be afraid to advocate investing capital to (ultimately) get IT spending under control. That was the advice of Randy Mott, CIO of Hewlett-Packard, back in January, and it still applies. Sure, times are tight, but there's no better time to rationalize overall IT spending than when it's really needed -- when every buck counts.
Once again, a tip of the hat to Micro Focus, which the PR person describes as "the IT spring-cleaning experts."
Related Reading
| To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy. | |
|
|
T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting! |
Subscribe to RSSResource Links
This Week's Issue
Technology Whitepapers
- Mobile BI: Actionable Intelligence for the Agile Enterprise
- Creating the Enterprise-Class Tablet Environment - by Yankee Group
- How To Regain IT Control In An Increasingly Mobile World - by BlackBerry
- The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet's Good Bones - by BlackBerry
- New Visual and Wizard-Driven Paradigms for Exploring Data and Developing Analytic Workflows












