Reconstructing IT

What will the post-recession IT landscape look like? This tough economic climate has forced businesses to rethink their IT strategies. Businesses are delaying or canceling all but their most critical projects, and adopting a "bare bones" approach for maintaining their IT infrastructure.

While this approach might stifle innovation, it can also inspire ideas for improving IT services. Instead of just doing more with less, organizations need to learn how to improve the value IT provides to business.

Before they can improve IT value, organizations need to understand where to focus their attention. The top areas with the greatest potential are:

• Cloud Computing Services
  
• Open Source Software
  
• IT Service Management

Cloud computing, perhaps one of the most highly debated IT topics today, offers a viable alternative to traditional IT services. Cloud computing services such as Google Apps and others can replace internally hosted services and reduce the infrastructure and resource requirements and costs needed to provide these services.

Open source software offers lower cost alternatives to the proprietary software typically used by businesses. In addition to the open source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform used by many websites today, other open source products like those from OpenOffice.org offer free and inexpensive alternatives to proprietary software.

IT service management (ITSM) pertains to the processes used to manage the delivery and support of IT services. There are several frameworks for improving ITSM. One example is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). By adopting ITIL good practices, businesses can increase the value of IT by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their ITSM processes.

Putting today's limited resources to good use is more critical than ever before. Rather than working harder to do more with less, businesses need to work smarter and reconstruct IT to improve its value.

By Harry Hiles, HBH Technology LLC — 23 Oct 2009

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