The changing role of the CIO
There’s an interesting post entitled “How can CIOs drive true business value?” over at ITToolbox. We see these issues a lot in the marketplace.
After the boom/bust cycle of a few years ago, the role of IT has changed and there’s a stronger than ever mandate to do more for less. This can be seen as IT tries to simplify their environments and ensure that each investment delivers real value.
Of course, at the same time, IT investments must meet the needs of the business. AMR Research has done research showing the increasing involvement of line-of-business managers in evaluating technology as it relates to supply chain and other key business issues. The goal here is clearly to ensure the business needs are being met.
There’s an interesting balance that needs to be met. On one hand, simplification can come from standardizing on a single vendor. On the other hand, best of breed solutions are often required to meet evolving business needs. Companies that enforce a single vendor mandate for the sake of a mandate miss opportunities to gain a competitive advantage by leveraging IT investment to meet critical business needs.
From our end, we proactively invest in trying to simplify this equation by making sure that our solutions:
> easily integrate with existing environments (typically SAP or Oracle)
> can be deployed quickly and at a reasonable cost to minimize the impact on customer resources and to deliver a rapid value (essentially to prove our value quickly)
> deliver unique value in terms of their ability to solve critical business problems
