The shape of tech spending in 2008
Published: 21 Jan 2008 12:30 GMT
...both compliance and risk-management issues on a siloed basis, by, for example, putting measures in place to deal with the US's Sarbannes-Oxley financial regulations, before dealing with the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard.
This approach has led to islands of automation and the creation of individual initiatives that have proved hard to join up into a coherent whole. As a result, organisations are now beginning to explore GCR on an increasingly enterprise-wide basis, not least as a means of transforming standalone IT assets into more coherent IT services.
"At the top, GCR is starting to drive technology purchasing to some degree and is becoming a real influencer. It's also a nice umbrella term to put round everything else, such as infrastructure optimisation, security, identity management and the like. But what this all boils down to is supporting what you're trying to do as a business and making the most of what you've got," said Atherton.
As most organisations have so far failed to establish a single point of GCR ownership, however, "you can't expect overnight consistency. It's bubbling to the top, but it's not there yet", Atherton added.
Another trend feeding into this notion of creating IT services, reducing IT redundancy and diminishing business fragmentation is that of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and process automation, standardisation and improvement.
Although the SOA acronym won't be as all-pervasive as it was in 2007, vendors are still likely to push the concept hard, not least in terms of it enabling component reuse, and resource and process optimisation.
"We'll see organisations looking at how they can maximise the return on their initial SOA investments. Many already have the core services infrastructure there, but they'll look at how they can harness it using business process-management technology," said Macehiter.
The rise of Enterprise 2.0
A final area that is likely to generate headlines, if not widespread adoption, is the concept of "Enterprise 2.0", or the application of Web 2.0 technologies, such as mashups and collaborative tools like blogs and wikis, in the business context.
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Although the hype will continue to mount, any uptake is likely to be limited to lines of business and could well be driven by departments themselves, rather than the IT organisation, as they start to evaluate potential business uses.
Cullen explained that, over the last five years, chief information officers have been reasserting control over front-end technologies by providing users with more tools for collaboration. "But what I think will happen now is that the business will see things that it wants to do, and can do, with less involvement from IT. So rather than say 'no, it's too risky', chief information officers will enable the business to do more on its own," he said.
Giving the business more input into IT planning, Cullen said, will "stress the current model of chief information officers and IT" and will lead to a more marked division between what he described as "IT general managers, who control and run technology", and "partner players", who play a more strategic role as agents of business change. "I'm talking about CIO 2.0 and, over the next year, I expect to see this trend increasing," Cullen added.
But no matter where IT chiefs' focus lies, Cullen recommended everyone to prepare for a potential economic downturn — the idea being that to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
"My advice is to structure budgets so that it's very clear what the cost drivers are and what makes investment go up or down. This means that, if you're asked to contribute to overall company savings, you can give the business an idea of where it's prudent to cut or not. Otherwise, you'll just have to cut in the easiest places, rather than the best, so it's best to start planning for this now," Cullen said.
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