Sometimes it takes either a significant service outage or major change in your business (or the economy), to get business leaders to re-examine whether your IT infrastructure and resources are performing efficiently and effectively? All too often, businesses only re-examine their IT infrastructure when a major snafu has occurred or some external force has turned the business model on its head.
It’s not surprising that many IT managers shy away from reviews of their IT systems and react only when upset customers are wondering why an order is late or a database has been compromised. The good news is IT projects often challenge traditional Return On Investment (ROI) analyses, since the gains in productivity and service quality can be elusive to capture on a spreadsheet while the costs are all too apparent. With IT budgets often consuming 10% or more of revenue, many managements seize the temptation to simply cap IT spending at a fixed percentage of total budget.
No IT executive can reasonably expect a CEO or board of directors to sign off on an IT project without hearing a solid business case for the investment any more than they would authorize a capital expenditure or new subsidiary without scrutiny. Yet, a study by the Gartner Group revealed otherwise. Gartner found that only 20% of organizations undertaking large systems projects and only 50% embarking on a re-engineering of their systems ever developed a business case for the project. And of those that did, even fewer checked back to see if the projects ever hit their goals.
Posted under Hardware Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization Software
This post was written by admin on November 4, 2008
