A recent blog mentioned the importance of the business to consider strategic investments during this recession. IT should be a significant participant in this effort. This is an opportunity to perform strategic house cleaning, while helping the business manage costs, while establishing the premise that IT is the strategic partner to prepare for the post recession surge. IT is recession relevant, the question is how and what to do to make that relevance clear.
* In a time of limited large scale initiatives, IT should consider rationalization first and foremost. Rationalization should go beyond the normal point solution to some server consolidation or virtual machine farms. In times that we face there is a great urge to slash and burn without a strategy, much like there never seems to be a time to have a strategy when business is booming. It is time to stop the madness. IT should take the opportunity to align with the business by driving programs to discover application redundancy across business lines: Some natural examples
* Why are there so many reporting systems? Does each business need to have massive infrastructure to run all of these reports?
* How many different ways do we buy the same information from the same sources for each line of business
* Do we really need 50 different operating platforms across the enterprise, can’t we consolidate on a dozen?
* How do we go beyond the basic virtualization strategy to consider grids that can be shared by multiple projects across business lines
* Do we understand how all applications are truly connected, and the implications of those connections across the data center ( e.g. latency, response time, the unintended growth of cross data center communication between applications)
* It is time to bring Business and IT to the table and discuss where it makes sense to invest in shared services that can be used across business lines
* In times such as this, the knee-jerk reaction has always been layoffs, retire applications whose business has suffered and of course out-sourcing. The problem is that the legacy of the last few investment surges have not been dealt with:
* massive proliferation of data bases and internet facing applications from the dot com boom
* the uncontrolled growth of blade racks in the push towards commodity servers
* On the other side of the recession this should not be an impediment to the next growth craze. Thos who invest wisely now will reap the benefit of that freedom.
Sheppard and Tony
