What are the 3 top burning issues for IT departments today?
My take (in no particular order).1. Enabling the enterprise to go after new revenues. IT has thus far optimized the enterprise - streamlining & automating business processes, thus enabling the enterprise to operate efficiently. Though there are incremental values yet to be realized in optimization, there is bigger role for IT to play in increasing business. For example - consumers are more tech savvy than ever. Proliferation of 'always connected' lifestyle a.k.a mobile devices along with Social networks making headway in consumer spending habits. Suddenly the enterprise is looking for IT to help navigate this change.
2. IT today sits on a 'data' treasure trove (note: I deliberately used 'data' instead of 'information' :-) ). Mining this data and gathering useful business intelligence is a challenge. Most large enterprises lack an effective enterprise data architecture and governance. IMHO, this is one of the bigger challenges in large organizations with many 'legacy' systems. Technology is not the issue here (we have had technologies like ETLs, DWH, MDM etc.,). The challenges lie in data stewardship, governance, and basically the culture of the enterprise.
3. In addition to these strategic priorities, IT does have an important role of 'keeping the lights on' function. While this takes a very chunk of IT budget, every IT department faces the challenge on how to free up resources from pure 'lights on' task to invest in strategic priorities. Outsourcing, cloud technologies are few options. While outsourcing and related management has matured, Cloud (Virtualization, *aaS) is still emerging (vendor management, security, integration, SLA, etc.). There are big opportunities here for System Integrators here. In other words, the challenge is how to reduce the operating cost for keeping the lights on without degrading SLA and invest the savings towards strategic objectives.
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