As the global economy goes through a downward cycle, organisations are more focused than ever on cutting costs and improving the bottom line. IT is a frequent target of budget reductions, but with technology playing a greater role in business operations, making the wrong decisions when trimming spending can negatively impact a corporation.
Whether it's an upturn or a downturn, cost cutting is always going to be important. The successful organisations are those that use management to get more visibility. If you don't have visibility into your existing cost structure, how do you know where to cut costs? How do you know you're doing it in the right place? If you don't have visibility into demand, how are you going to know how to prioritise? If you don't have visibility into how customers are interfacing with your applications, how do you know where improvements are needed, how do you know where you need additional capacity?
Unfortunately, organisations often don't have that visibility because they're working with a legacy of applications they've accumulated over the years, often using disparate operating platforms. In addition, businesses need to anticipate demand when they're deciding to invest resources for the future.
Enterprise IT management (EITM) is what's needed to streamline IT while determining how it can enhance business results. EITM requires visibility into a number of areas that can provide a complete picture of what IT can do to maximise business value.
In terms of managing IT costs, EITM emphasises the measured use of innovations like automation and virtualisation, rather than implementing them ‘willy-nilly’. For example, using technology with a layer of intelligence allows organisations to dynamically manage capacity in virtualised environments so it can go where it's needed, when it's needed. Automation can relieve IT staff of the most time-consuming, error-causing tasks.
As global financial institutions have been rocked to their foundations, risk management becomes an increasingly crucial component of the EITM solution. Not only is it likely that companies will have to deal with increasing regulations in the near future, but they must also correctly prioritise the IT investments they'll need to make. Automation can be used to ease the tasking of complying with current and future regulations.
Risk also comes in the form of potential security breaches. With a workforce that's growing increasingly mobile, organisations can no longer rely on their old solutions to meet today's new security challenges. If we look at the way businesses are starting to move, people within organisations are becoming far more mobile, they're working more from home, they're demanding the use of collaboration and productivity tools, they converse using Gmail, they're even starting to use things like Facebook and their own tools and techniques to drive their productivity. That has a major impact on security, because traditional security methods and policies cannot cope with social behaviours that extend beyond an organisational firewall. A more enterprise approach is going to be critical as organisations move forward.
Another factor affecting security, as well as the bottom line of businesses, is the growth in online applications with which consumers are interfacing. This trend requires organisations to become more customer-centric in how they develop and manage these applications in order to keep up with an increasingly sophisticated client base.
In these challenging economic times, businesses need to make the right trade-offs as they look to IT as a place to reduce costs while still supporting growth. Organisations must have the proper level of visibility into performance, security, resource allocation and other critical factors in order to get a complete picture of how IT can enhance business results. By bringing together technological innovations, risk management, application performance management solutions, and more, EITM can help ensure the difficult choices are also the right ones.
*Peter Waterhouse is a senior principal in EITM strategy and marketing at CA.
