CIOs Need to Adjust Their Technology Portfolio Management Perspectives Print E-mail
User Rating: / 3
PoorBest 
Steven Bandrowczak, the Nortel CIO, wants to reduce his software application portfolio from 1,100 titles down to 100 over an 18 month period. (Read Andy McCue's ZDNet/Asia article.) According to Bandrowczak, "When I came we had a lot of projects not necessarily 100 per cent aligned to key initiatives.” Great quote, Steven...
I'm sorry, but that pretty much sounds to me like corporate-speak for: "We were paying for a whole lot of useless projects." Don't feel bad, Steven, most of us are likely floating around on that same leaky pontoon.
When it comes to software asset management, we've found that a majority of companies could benefit from some serious licensing, support, and maintenance house-cleaning. Unfortunately, it isn't going to happen until we take a good look at changing the status quo.

If you could reduce the costs of IT assets while continuing to deliver the same-or even better-services, would you take action? Read on to discover some of the key reasons technology asset management and portfolio management initiatives fail--or, even better, succeed.


I don't think it's any secret that the core responsibilities of a CIO have been gradually changing over the past decade. Business tech life has evolved since the 80's and 90's (big surprise, right?). The days of barely-monitored tech spending are over and intelligent C-suite executives are now (or they better be) looking for the genuine life cycle business value in all tech investments—including project management.
"You get what you pay for so start paying for only products, functionality, and services you genuinely need!"
CIOs can no longer survive solely on their tech backgrounds. Instead, we need to begin building our credibility as business process experts while downplaying those “techie” roots. The traditional tech operations group is still far behind most business units when it comes to synchronizing our efforts with the strategic (cost/benefit) side of the enterprise. Statistically, fewer than 2% of companies have demonstrated a solid functional relationship between their tech sides and their business sides. Guess why we over-spend on tech projects...

When it comes to improving the technology portfolio management initiative, virtually ANY company can achieve significant cost and risk reductions with very little up front investment. Savings of as much as 30% of the IT software budget are well in line with this concept. Additional savings in tech support and maintenance are also just shy of no-brainer process improvements to those companies that are seriously interested in a more effective ROIC.

Finally, a well-thought-out tech portfolio management initiative can bring enormous savings in a matter of weeks—not years. A substantial key to potential success is that your initiative should be based on value, NOT based on some costly silver bullet proprietary vendor solution. The vast majority of benefit from ITPM initiatives in nearly every enterprise can be found in simply re-envisioning life cycle management.

In this case; in this time; plugging a good measure of common sense into the initiative can go a very long way toward converting tech costs and risks into improved bottom line delivered value for business technology goods and services investments.
After all: Who IS the customer in these relationships?
Comments
Search RSS
Only registered users can write comments!

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."

 
< Prev   Next >


Sphere: Related Content

Recommendations

Plaxo

Syndicate