The New IT Rule Book

Bangalore: CIOs these days leverage on ingenuity to improve IT operations and processes, but to achieve this innovation is needed which involves the creation of better or more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society. In an industry where innovation threatens to pull down inherited and traditional systems and practices (and vendors) just as it generates new opportunities, IT organizations are nonetheless resistant to change but It's quite natural to fear the unidentified, question the unproven, be skeptical of the latest and greatest says Rob Preston in his article to InformationWeek.

Even companies which boast on keeping up with the latest and hottest technologies tend to put down and question latest trends like the continued enterprise IT resistance to the cloud, social movements etc rating them as insecure, non compatible etc.

Most of the CIOs around recognize and understand that the old IT rulebook needs revisions but are helpless as many IT teams still cling on to practices like developing own applications which are expensive when they can actually make use of a web variety; securing devices and other things rather than most critical, sensitive data, using cloud computing services like the software as a service (SaaS) for non-strategic applications and infrastructure.

Preston in his article says that IT organizations that fail to indulge in adopting strategies like ‘Smaller,’ ‘lighter,’  ‘more agile’ and "less expensive" which come from the new IT rule book and are more than just buzzwords will get demoted to being cost centers.

CIO of an international manufacturing company says that part of changing IT model involves moving bigger chunks of the IT architecture to the cloud "And part of this is actually greater specialization and customization enabled by more powerful tools," adds the CIO. "SaaS and cloud enable this, but also the evolution of development stacks and platforms which have made software development much more productive. When you look at what small companies are doing in terms of development speed, you no longer need armies of people to write software. I can see a swing back to more in-house development. Less outsourcing. Less monolithic ERPs. More cloud and SaaS."

Preston finally summarizes that the new IT rulebook isn't for the weak hearted. Getting to "smaller," "lighter," and "more agile" may not require a complete IT architecture renovation, instead it will require some hard decisions about legacy platforms and processes.