SmartAdvice: Tips For Turning IT From Cost Center To Profit Center

CIOs must focus on increasing revenue, not just cutting costs, in moving IT from cost center to profit center, <B>The Advisory Council</B> says. Also, how to build a defensible business case for moving off obsolete Windows 98 PCs, and using the Future Search approach to jump-start a vision statement.

InformationWeek Staff, Contributor

February 12, 2004

2 Min Read
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Making It Work
Sound simple? It is, and it isn't. These conferences require three things to work, with no exceptions:

  • A compelling issue that almost always involves a turning point of some kind;



  • Leadership support, the more personal the better;



  • The right people in the room: a collection of people who know the history of events, who are knowledgeable about both day-to-day activities and big-picture trends, who have wisdom and perspective, and who are committed to making change happen.

In Future Search conferences, people are routinely surprised at how much they agree with each other and how many values they hold in common. Organizations discover capabilities they never knew they had, and they take actions they didn't believe possible. It all combines to be pretty powerful stuff.

-- David Foote

Marc Nolan, TAC Expert, and president and chief operating officer of VAS International Inc., has more than 25 years' experience in working with clients developing best practices to increase their bottom line. He is a leading business change leadership-management consultant, specializing in assisting IT organizations in moving from cost centers to profit centers, and in the new role IT must play as a business unit.

Peter Schay, TAC executive VP and chief operating officer, has 30 years of experience as a senior IT executive in both IT vendor and research industries. He was most recently VP and chief technology officer of SiteShell Corp. Previously at Gartner, he was group VP of global research infrastructure and support, and launched coverage of client/server computing in the early 1990s.

David Foote, TAC Thought Leader, has more than 20 years of experience in technology including 13 years as an analyst and consultant at Gartner, Meta Group, and Foote Partners, where he is co-founder, president, and chief research officer. His specialties include a range of private and public-sector IT management practices and workforce trends and issues; offshore sourcing and strategic resource management; enterprise project delivery; organizational transition and transformation; and IT compensation. His editorial opinion columns, articles, and contributions appear regularly in a variety of business, IT, and HR publications, and he appears on radio, television, and global Web casts.

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