IT and Business: From Alignment to Optimization
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Transcript of IT and Business: From Alignment to Optimization
CIO QuickPulse * IT and Business
IT and Business: From Alignment to OptimizationIt is a far more collaborative world between business and IT than it once was, which opens up to CIOs the opportunity—and the challenge—to move toward optimizing IT and business operations.
Achieving business and IT alignment has been
the top priority on CIOs’ agendas for years.
But the more forward-thinking IT leaders—those
who have been relentless about showing how
information technology is a core part of the
business model—are ready to push forward
the innovation agenda and enable even better
enterprise performance.
The question of how to build success atop
what now is a solid foundation of alignment
is foremost in their thoughts. They’re especially
focused on the challenges of doing so in an
era increasingly defined by the need for
innovation without disruption, whether that’s
employees wanting to use their own mobile
devices at work or the growth of Big Data,
which leaves companies awash in information
before they’ve become masters at exploiting it.
The imperative for CIOs, then, is about opti-
mizing IT and business operations, and they’re
determined to do so even if it means moving be-
yond their traditional comfort zones. To that end,
they are plotting how to accommodate new in-
dustry trends that impact IT in ways that promote
the greatest business agility and advantages.
Alignment: The Foundation for OptimizationEvidence that it is a far more collaborative world
between business and IT comes from a new IDG
Research Services survey: It finds that nearly 90
percent define their relationship with business as
being very much or somewhat collaborative.
At least part of the reason for this must be at-
tributed to the fact that IT leaders have embraced
keeping IT and business priorities in sync. The
survey shows that for 60 percent of respondents,
this is the key to having business peers equally
invested in optimizing the IT operations that sup-
port their most-cherished endeavors.
Meanwhile, 40 percent of IT leaders are taking
processes off-premise—not just to the cloud, but
also to the mobile devices that increasingly serve
as business users’ primary tools. Extending key
business processes to mobile devices—assum-
ing IT accounts for security, performance and
the like—can make it easier to do business with
customers and partners. In fact, mobile-enabled
applications and virtualization count for two of IT’s
three top spending priorities for optimization.
Optimization: From the Ground Floor UpThe trio of top spending priorities also includes
enabling collaboration, extending from internal
employees through to customers, partners and
suppliers. Forty-seven percent of respondents
cite this, just a hair’s breadth ahead of the 45
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percent that claim a focus on mobile-enabled
applications and virtualization. Nipping at these
responses’ heels is a goal to harness data with
analytics, considered a priority for 40 percent of
all respondents.
Interestingly, one of the things that distin-
guishes the one-third of respondents who say
they are very effective at quickly adapting to
shifting business priorities is that they tend to be
more collaborative enterprises compared with
other organizations. And the 45 percent who
consider that their enterprise has a very col-
laborative relationship between IT and business
management are more apt than their peers to be
investing in harnessing data with analytics.
Measuring Success: Change in the AirThe optimized enterprise can—and still does—
measure the impact of its efforts by how much
costs are reduced. Nearly 80 percent of respon-
dents see that as the primary success metric
for judging efforts to optimize IT and business.
Even those IT leaders who give themselves
high marks for effectiveness in accommodating
changes in business priorities count this as their
top success metric.
However, they also are more likely than less
effective organizations to rely on “gains in em-
ployee productivity” as a measure of success.
Only about half of the respondents now judge
success by such factors. But it’s hard to imagine
that this won’t change, given the clear impact
that the intelligent adoption of IT’s leading priori-
ties can have on achieving those ends.
Optimization: A Continuing Opportunity for LearningAccording to the overwhelming majority of survey
respondents (70 percent), the focus on IT and
business optimization is expected to increase.
For another 17 percent, it will remain dynamic, so
get ready for the outlook at those organizations
to veer from soft focus to sharp levels of intensi-
ty. This fits in with the evolution of CIOs’ role from
functional to strategic, which was revealed in the
2012 “State of the CIO Survey” by CIO magazine.
It’s clear that the optimized enterprise cannot
exist within a traditional context of IT, or of the
expected financial models for governing the
balance between IT operational costs and invest-
ments in projects to support the business. In an
age when there is less focus on the specifics of
cost containment—and more focus simply on
getting the cost-cutting job done, period—just
about one-fifth of respondents currently see
shifting CAPEX to OPEX or the ratio of IT OPEX
to investments in new initiatives as measures of
optimized IT-business success.
Within the organizations that are focused on
optimization, IT leaders are well positioned to
exploit trends already under way. So, instead
of homing in on micromanaging costs, they
are optimizing their ability to respond to the
demands that accompany trends, such as IT
consumerization and Big Data, to business
advantage—including the next wave of intersec-
tions with mobile, collaboration and analytics
technologies. How poised is your enterprise to
put these trends into an optimized context that
works to the benefit of the business?
CIO QuickPulse * IT and Business
How Are You Measuring the Success of Optimizing IT and Business Operations?
78%Reduced Costs
56%Improved Customer Service
53%Gains in Employee Productivity
For more information, visit www.sap.com/simplify-operations
Source: IDG Research, January 2012
Copyright © 2012 by SAP