* Business agility to be discussed at Network World’s IT Roadmap conference
In the July 31 newsletter, we stated our belief that it is often difficult for a networking organization to be seen as providing direct business benefit. Certainly senior managers know that their business could not function without the network, just as it couldn’t function without electricity or water. That does not mean that senior business managers think that electricity and water provide direct business value.
There are no easy answers as to how to get senior managers to see the business value of networking. There are, however, some techniques that we can use to help managers recognize the business value of networking. Jim will discuss some of these techniques at the forthcoming IT Roadmap (ITR) conference that Network World is producing at the Adams’s Mark hotel in Dallas on Sept. 6.
At the ITR conference, Jim will moderate two tracks – one on network management and the other on network and application acceleration. During his network management keynote, Jim will discuss his belief that in order for IT professionals to demonstrate business value, they must relate what they do to what the company’s senior business managers care about. The basic idea being that IT does not have value unto itself – its value is that it allows an organization to achieve business success.
Jim will discuss issues that are of interest to specific industry segments such as healthcare and government, as well as talk about a number of generic issues that would be of interest to business managers of organizations of all sizes and in all industries. One such generic issue is the need for organizations to become more agile. Business agility is a phrase that gets used often and in a variety of different contexts. Jim will define business agility as the ability to respond, in real-time-enough fashion, to situations that impact the health and well-being of the organization and its stakeholders. Jim will give examples of specific organization and what real-time enough fashion means to them. Jim will also discuss the link between business agility and the supporting technologies.
We’ll discuss more about the Dallas IT Roadmap conference in the next newsletter. In the meantime, you are all invited to attend this free conference and continue the dialogue around some of the topics that we have been discussing in recent newsletters.
