In a recent survey from Forbes, a big question poped up. Is the demand for IT services down or up? Well, the experts have said it right that "demand is still very strong". It's the companies who are cutting down budgets on new assets, hires, software, and hardware. They are trying to meet customer's needs with existing resources. Infact, they are curtailing consultants rather than consultancy. Most of the data is digitized and the volume of transactions are growing like anything. A robust data management infrastructure through data consolidation (green data center) and virtualization have some answers to cut down on cost and might bring a smile on the CIOs face to add some value to the customer's growing needs of humangous transactions. The transation-volume-revenue, equation has broken down. But, the amount of work involved is growing at it's own pace. In the early years of 2000 the focus was on outsourcing when we were trapped in similar recession then. Now,...

Many companies’ IT support functions are missing a golden opportunity to provide greater value to the larger enterprise. While a few leading companies have recognized that IT support should be tied explicitly to its impact on user productivity and business-unit performance, many organizations remain caught in the IT support trap perpetuated by misguided SLAs. To improve the value they provide, IT support functions must go far beyond measuring only a narrow part of the service experience. We believe the time is right for CIOs to shift from measuring IT service performance for its own sake to measuring its effectiveness through real business results, such as end user productivity and its impact on company revenue and profitability. If they can do it, they will be able to begin to achieve the goal of measuring and representing the true value that the IT organization and its support services deliver to the business.

One of the manifestations of the mid-Level 2 sticking point referred to in an earlier post is around Enterprise Architecture (EA). At the risk of over simplifying, way back, most IT shops had some kind of Technology Architecture (TA) capability - usually focused on selecting and enforcing standards, providing an overall schema and logic for physical hardware, networks, and perhaps delivering technology roadmaps (e.g., what gets retired, what replaces it, how). Typically, as TA evolves (matures?), there is an increased focus on the information and data domains, and TA becomes Information Technology Architecture (ITA). Note: sometimes the labels don’t properly align with the reality, so we find Technology Architecture efforts referred to as ITA, but they really do a poor job of addressing the information domain, and ITA efforts referred to as EA that do a poor job of addressing the business process domain. The next shift is when ITA evolves into Enterprise Architecture - and the really ...