It's that time of the year again... the list of new year's resolutions, predictions and outlooks on Enterprise IT for 2011 are all over the place. Anything new? Nope. Anything surprising? Nope.
Sure 2011 will be the year of social media, careful steps into the (enterprise) cloud, increasing your bandwidth, going mobile, Windows 7, advanced analytics, iPads and other tablet-like clones, digitizing the enterprise, renewing and virtualizing the data center and the renaissance of the new CIO. But frankly my dear, this is the same list as in 2010, 2009 and 2008. But aren't we forgetting one thing? Yep, doing a reality check.
Most companies have suffered from the recession and what will companies do when they are in dire (financial) straits? Right, they slash the budget. And guess who is the first in line to walk away with less money.... it is the CIO.
If you have not invested in innovation, you are out of the game in 2011
Over the past years, most innovation budgets have been cut to the absolute minimum because IT executives could neither convince the board nor demonstrate a tangible ROI for most IT-enabled innovations. In parallel, baseline budgets (i.e. keeping the lights on) were also subject to downsizing.
Outcome of this equation is that your IT shop is running on obsolete and old-school technologies. Any innovation or change budget left is used to either do a renewal of core systems, make the first step towards SOA/SBA or virtualizing the data center. It could be worse, some IT departments still haven't adopted portfolio thinking either in the projects or in the services arena. You would be surprised to see how many companies are still struggling with CRM, SCM, ECM, DMS, BI and other first-gen business technologies. So putting the 2011 wish list into the right perspective and seeing all those innovations topping the list, then I'm afraid we'd better wake up and smell the coffee. No chance the CIO can increase the innovation budget if IT operations are not run in an efficient and effective way. No way he will get funding for social media, cloud computing or mobile technologies if the business still goes without a single customer view and swears by Excel as the holy grail of data reconciliation.
So what's my bet for 2011 priorities? Well the same as 2010, 2009 and 2008... back to basics, building up core capabilities, on-time delivery of strategic IT initiatives, bringing the run budget down to an acceptable level, efficiency & effectiveness and creating operational efficiencies through automation. Of course, business/IT alignment should also be added to this list but then again - shouldn't business/IT alignment be one of those recurring action items on every CIOs new year's resolution list? Wishing you all the best for the new year and may all your ambitions become true....