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Is your IT having Deficiency of Vitamin C?

Guruprasad Murty
Vice President- IT & IS-Microland
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Guruprasad Murty
Headquartered in Bangalore and employing over 2,300 professionals worldwide, Microland is a leading specialist IT infrastructure, virtualization and cloud services provider with a global footprint. Microland's services address the complete IT Infrastructure needs of an organization through the SmartFutureTM offering which includes Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Virtualization, and Mobility services and the SmartNowTM offering which includes Infrastructure Management Services, IT Modernization Services, Assurance and Compliance Services and Technical Support Services.

We all know the importance of vitamins in our body. The body needs a minimum amount of vitamins and minerals each day to remain healthy and function properly. So what is the relevance of vitamins to IT? There are many factors IT is dependent on and these factors are commonly referred as vitamins. Without these vitamins, IT either won’t exist or function.

How many of you are aware that primates, including humans, and guinea pigs do not synthesize vitamin C internally. So we have to depend on external source for our daily vitamin C requirements. Doesn't this sound familiar in case of IT too? So what is vitamin C and how does it impact IT?

Rather than looking at just one C, let us look at 3 Critical Cs related to IT, i.e. Cost, Control and Change. Any deficiency in these 3 Cs will have a huge impact on the way IT functions and performs.

Cost- In almost all the organization IT is a cost center. First getting the required budget is a big challenge and then how and where to spend that little money is the big question. In most of the cases 70 percent of the budget is spent on keeping the lights on, i.e. maintaining and supporting the existing applications, which leaves very less for any new initiatives. It is also a well-known fact that most of initiatives have huge cost and schedule overrun. We invariably miss out so many hidden costs while planning for any project, which includes infrastructure upgrade cost, communication cost, third party license / implementation cost, etc. It is imperative that planning and tracking the cost is the most important aspect of any CIO's goals and objectives.


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