IT’s Key Investment Areas and Top Attributes
IT’s Key Investment Areas and Top Attributes
April 27, 2007: After surveying 300 enterprises across North America, Ovum Summit has released what it believes, are the key investment areas and top attributes of highly effective IT organisations.
Virtualisation is at the top of the food chain, with Ovum identifying the aggressive use of consolidation and virtualisation working to create more dynamic and flexible infrastructure architectures. A significant investment in SOA based applications will work to promote business process flexibility while an investment in a comprehensive set of automated IT management tools won’t go astray.
But what exactly is a ‘highly effective IT organisation?’ Ovum says it’s those organisations that can efficiently fulfil changing business requirements without disrupting business operations or end user productivity. Of the 300 organisations surveyed, 22 percent came up trumps in meeting this definition. “These highly effective organisations have laid a lot of groundwork over the last couple of years by implementing virtualisation, SOA and ITIL,” says Mary Johnston, author of the survey and Ovum Summit VP.
Ovum says these Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) recommendations require broad-based implementation with the majority of process areas covered by current recommendations. ITIL offers a framework of best practice approaches for delivering IT services. Ovum believes successful organisations are well placed to take advantage of the soon to be released ITIL V3 recommendations that will integrate software development, release and operations processes.
“They are also in the best position to take advantage of emerging collaboration and enterprise social software solutions,” says Johnston.
“The other 78 percent or organisations need to rapidly develop both infrastructure and operations roadmap to achieve these same levels of effectiveness if they are going to stay competitive in the coming years.”
Ovum also identified the need for enterprise to express high levels of willingness to take on new challenges as a key to operational effectiveness. These challenges range from developing end-of-life and recycling strategies to experimenting with social software tools.
Ovum asked 32 in-depth questions of 300 respondents from enterprise and min-market organisations. From there, the agency developed over 300 data analysis charts examining the use and satisfaction levels and operational effectiveness of consolidation, virtualisation, SOA, strategic operating systems and ITSM.