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24 Sep 2009
Is now really the best time for IT to become fitter and if so, just how practical is this? The falling cost of computing power has created unsustainable over-provisioning of IT.
Yet there is little growth in IT spending this year. Service levels still need to be maintained. This means that no telco chief executive can afford delayed connection times and no bank executive wants longer ATM queues.
Rather than doing more with less, you need to make what you have work better – do more with the same. If buying clothes the next size up was poor discipline in times of plenty, it is unforgivable now.
The best strategy is to discard the brochures and take a long look in the mirror for underutilisation of hardware, software licences and staff. Divide customer applications into three broad classes to help prioritise IT funds:
* The transaction-heavy applications on which the customer business runs. If
these go down, customers lose lots of money quickly.
* Applications not used every day and legacy applications. Many can be replaced
by online versions.
* Applications that do not readily fall into the other categories. These can be
redeployed in virtualised environments and the resources saved can add muscle to
the first category of applications.
Transaction-heavy applications are the most visible to your customers’ customers and your customers’ management team. They are where IT professionals may really deliver the most value.
Take a transaction-centric view rather than an application-centric view. Customers do not care about the average response times for databases or applications.
Modern performance management software may address bottlenecks at the transaction level. It is transactions, not applications, which the business trusts IT to deliver.
IT is not the first industry to have to up its game in lean times. The US steel industry now produces more steel than it did 30 years ago, with fewer plants and employees. While IT has been the catalyst for many productivity leaps it has not itself done the same thing.
Fad diets do not work, but freeing up and redeploying unused computing resources may do. And an improved track record of return on investment may weigh in favour of IT budget increases as the economy picks up.
Mark Kremer is chief executive officer at Precise Software
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