Here are a few good reads on the impact of the fiasco with some snippets below:

Investors.com 

"Hardware purchases will be postponed, software upgrades will be postponed and customer projects will slow. This is not a time for (corporate customers) to take big risks. No big spending decisions will get made."

"Total revenue for the Indian outsourcing market is down 31% this year"

"Disruptions and uncertainty for U.S. financial markets are likely to delay some new software projects until the fourth quarter or next year"

ZDNet.com

"Right now, there are four clear survivors: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and J.P. Morgan. Tech spending elsewhere may go kaput. "

"Infrastructure consolidation projects will last for years. In IT spending surveys demand for consultants hired by the project remains strong. "

"Project managers will be in demand. Systems integration skills will be critical and you’ll need project managers to consolidate all of those applications and data centers as well as rearchitect systems. "

Ganesh Nagarajan of Zensar.

"The preliminary analysis of the current situation indicates that the impact will be short term and company-specific and though all strategy planners will continue to keep a watch on any further downstream impacts"

Computerweekly

"Tactical software and hardware spending will be hit first, followed by the more-strategic IT services in the long run"

"Software as a service could be a winner from this as could any model where people pay on consumption rather than up front cash"



Yeah, I am lazy!

Corporate IT Gotchas Indian Business

Tom Foydel over at Sightlines writes about the next wave of technologies that will hit the SME sector. The regular suspects are all there : RFID, Open Source, SAAS, Clouds and stuff. There are a couple of surprises as well because you don't hear so much about these yet: Alternate energy, Cell Technology. Tom's list seems comprehensive but I'd like to know what you think? Are there any emerging technologies that are not in the list?Corporate IT Technology

Ramshankar laments about the lack of visibility when it comes to the services that IT departments support and expose to the business. "There are very few organizations where one gets a sense of what IT truly delivers to its customers at what cost, at what performance level, conditions and so on….What about “make your own Service menu” like “make your own pasta”! Is there flexibility within IT Services to accomplish this?" He goes on to suggest ITIL V3, a standard that recommends dynamic catalogs as a possible solution that can help end users and business see IT like a burger. Log in to an intranet portal or something and 'order' IT. Essentially hide away complexity and expose a very simple front end to business.

Renjith blogs about ITIL V3…"the Service Catalog concept have been enhanced and coupled with Demand Management, Portfolio Management and Request fulfillment."  

Interesting. Now, where's the burger?



IT plays multiple hats when it comes to business. I briefly touched upon the two broad types of IT demand in a previous post. Basically, there is the transformational 'change the business' part, and then you have the keep-the-lights-on 'run the business' aspect. 

Certain portions of 'run the business' are definitely like a burger. Desktop software installations come to mind. You have limited complexity, a fixed set of ingredients (read skills sets), a mature and repeatable execution model, resources are interchangable and not too many unknowns. When was the last time an IT engineer failed to install Office on your desktop ? Surely you can, given the right tools, adopt sophisticated demand forecasting with integrated resource fullfillment and maybe even aggregate demand across customers and have a portfolio level approach. The benefits are clear and easy to quantify.

'Change the business' is an entirely different game altogether and so will any aspect of 'run the business' that requires close integration with 'change the business'. This is more complex stuff that requires a more strategic approach both from business and from IT. 'Change the business' is more like a full course meal in a gourmet restaurant, replete with all the bells and whistles. 

Burgers are cool and have their place. So do gourmet dinners. The trick is to know what to serve to which customer.

Corporate IT Project Management

The CIO magazine has published it's annual state of the CIO report. Here are some interesting snippets from the report:
-Strong CIOs don't innovate. They figure out ways to make money for the business.
-Stop talking about alignment. It marks CIOs as outsiders. Strong CIOs work with their peers. They guide them, educate them, persuade them, debate them, hear them, help them, decide with them and execute the enterprise's strategy with them.
-CIOs are of three broad types: Functional heads-who run the IT shop , Transformational leaders- guys who can lead business process change, Business strategists- Works with external customers to develop new business ideas that use IT. No prizes for guessing which category gets paid the most.
-Average tenure of a CIO is about 4 years and five months.
-Only 41% of CIO's report to the CEO.

You can read more at http://www.cio.com/

Corporate IT