Harsh times are coming for IT divisions. What to do ?

Financial Insights, a research subsidiary of IDC, forecasts that top 10 american financial institutions  will cut  their IT budgets by 30%. Money is becoming dearer worldwide and investments harder to make. Europe which need big restructuring, fears recession.

For IT managers, it is time to consolidation for being able to support unavoidable budget cuts.

What means consolidation ?

IT Strategy is not enough, what’s about men ?

A recent survey commissioned by the Society for Information Management gave the following concerns for CEO, CIO and enterprise top managers :

1) IT/business alignment

2) Building business skills in IT

3) IT strategic planning

4) Attracting new IT professionals

5) Making better use of information

6) Manage change

7) Reduce the cost of doing business

Improve IT quality

9) Retaining IT professionals

10) Security and privacy

Among the high ranked points, 2-4-9 regards human resources management. Indeed, if you have not the right men able to implementing your strategy you ‘ll probably loose most of your bets. Successful companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple,…  have build their success on human asset.

If you transform, align

I already wrote in a previous post how the number of papers discussing IT alignement suprised me. Indeed, for me, priority should be given to deciding, to planning and to setting up Enterprise Change.

Formerly, 15 years ago, Enterprise Change was contemplated by planning and launching big projects which frequently crashed. Then, best practises of IT led to break down big projects into pieces managed locally. It results an higher rate of success, but with some pieces left behind. By this time, Enterprise was rather a collection of stovepipes with more or less communication in between.

Some of us attempted to glue stovepipes with EAI and business process automation. They get a pretty complicated system which never had the expected flexibility required to follow users business changes.