Stories by Chris Howard

How to keep the digital momentum going

Even in a world that’s constantly changing, you can prepare your organisation to proactively deliver what’s next — continuously

Written by Chris Howard02 April 19 06:30

Making every dollar count

Caesar Augustus chastised generals who rushed into battle: Festina lente! (Make haste slowly!). In these confounding days, with banks collapsing around us, global markets spinning into oblivion and the shadow of greed darkening the promise of capitalism, this admonition is good advice in such times. Translated into the realm of enterprise IT management, Caesar Augustus is telling us to hold up on projects, IT spending and staffing decisions, determine how far ahead we can see, avoid knee-jerk reactions and take stock of what we have. Acting too quickly without sufficient rationale, may expend precious resources in the wrong direction and thus inhibit our ability to react when needed.
Even though some organisations will feel greater impact from the tightening economy than others will, this is a good time for all to assess IT spending choices. By continuing to invest wisely during a downturn, an organisation strengthens its long-term future. Thanks to virtualisation technology and outsourcing, there are some obvious ‘easy wins’ in the datacentre. Collaboration technologies make it easier to be productive without being co-located. Deep within the IT infrastructure, costs can be contained by reducing the number of moving parts and redundancies. In addition, as people and partners move into, out of and within an organisation with greater frequency, well-designed identity management and other security controls for the virtual enterprise add considerable value.

Written by Chris Howard15 Feb. 09 22:00