Are today's corporate IT infrastructures ready to handle all the demands that are about to be placed upon them? If the results of a new survey by the IBM Institute for Business Value are any indication, the answer is an emphatic “no.”
The survey of 750 business and IT executives finds that fewer than 10 percent indicate that their IT infrastructure is fully prepared to meet the demands of new capabilities.” Included here are the integration of cloud technology, mobile devices, social media and business analytics.
Conversely, the study also finds that the 10 percent of the respondents that have invested more extensively in their infrastructures exhibit greater preparedness in the areas of cloud (52 versus 10 percent of their IT-siloed counterparts), mobility (50 versus 34 percent), social and collaborative tools (36 versus 28 percent), and analytics and big data (44 versus 39 percent).
The report quotes one insurance industry CIO, whose organization is in the forefront of efforts to embrace transformative IT: “We have to deal with many challenges such as growth and retention, risk and compliance, and efficiency and expense control,” he says. “Our IT infrastructure helps us to deal with these issues with the help of mobile and social media, big data and cloud computing.”
According to the report, companies that are ahead of the game in IT transformation have the following characteristics:
- They establish a well-defined enterprise IT infrastructure strategy and roadmap.
- Their IT organizations collaborate effectively with the rest of the business to provide IT infrastructure solutions to support business needs (such as improving one-to-one customer engagement).
- They use the IT function toa broker technology services for the rest of the organization. For example, the IT group might provide expertise to various business units for procuring software-as-a-service and other cloud-based services .
- They support cross-functional teams of infrastructure domain experts to identify, source and implement IT infrastructure solutions
They collect, analyze and document performance measures.
