Planning and operating modern Information Technology platforms is a complex challenge, with a daunting number of options and trade-offs to consider. Each choice has an impact on a company’s IT capabilities and its IT costs. We believe strongly that an organization’s leadership should be informed of the options and their ramifications so they can make fully informed decisions to Optimize IT for their company.
Here are just a few of the decision points and trade-off considerations we believe should be examined closely; different companies, industries and strategies will have different “right answers” to these questions:
- Custom software vs. Off-the-shelf vs. Licensed/customized (the landscape is more complex now than the traditional “buy vs. build”)
- Application development in-house vs. Vendor partnerships vs. Full outsourcing of programming
- Software platforms – Open source vs. Commercially licensed
- Data quality & completeness vs. Data entry speed & efficiency
- Distributed analysis & data access vs. Centralized data publication
- Website capabilities – e-commerce & integration needed to operating software vs. Isolated “brochure” site
- Support team staffing & service levels – In-house vs. Onshore vs. Offshore vs. Hybrid/split, “White glove” vs. Low cost
- Training team approach – high-touch individualized in-person vs. Limited/standardized online training materials
- Formality & Regulatory controls/documentation requirements – Full auditability vs. Prudent compliance vs. Limited “paper trail”
- Engineering expertise in-house vs. Targeted outside consultant engagements vs. Full outsourcing
- Remote worker technology options – Ease of access vs. Security
- Data center vs. Colocation racks vs. Cloud – including hybrid cloud options now emerging
- Full hardware & telecom redundancy (“maximum stability“) vs. Targeted redundancy (“prudent stability“) vs. Limited/no redundancy (“as cheap as possible”)
- Disaster protections – Recovery time requirements vs. Flexibility
Some of these strategic decisions not only Optimize an IT group for a given company’s business plan, but may better position it if they plan to seek to Innovate Beyond Efficiency to Monetize IT via new/optimized revenue streams and market-share. For that reason we like to view Optimizing IT in the context of our overall IT Strategy & Innovation Framework…
Finding the right decisions and optimal points on all of the trade-off spectrums involved with enterprise IT will help a company Optimize its IT investment and its costs and benefits from technology.
Contact us now to begin a dialogue about how Innovation Vista can help your organization Optimize its IT…