White Paper Abstract:
Over the years, most died-in-the-wool IT managers have seen new ideas come and go. They've patted themselves on the back for not getting involved in many of them. But every so often there are inflection points that are so profound they warrant more than being dismissed as IT fashion. The arrival of the PC and client/server computing was one big shift that started in earnest approximately 15 years ago, though it had certainly been simmering on a low heat for many years before that. The way the Internet affected the way billions of people interact with each other and with applications that serve their needs is another example. Some companies ignored these seismic shifts and while the rest of the world moved on, they lagged behind typically with greater costs, lower efficiency and poor responsiveness. Agility and economyAny business, as long as it has enough capital, can be more agile. When we think of some of the problems with agility, the most obvious one is that of having enough staff to take their eye off operational matters and concentrate instead on something new. With a finite set of resources (the people in the organization) to deploy, they can do one thing, or they can do another. An incredibly small percentage of them can do both - for a short time. However, a healthy bank balance allows us to either hire the people we need or buy the services we need. This may well be a good plan, but it's a careful balancing act because eating in to the cash reserves of a company limits its potential to increase budget for research, development, exploration, business development, service development and so on. But solving some other non-operational issue might in its turn increase the profitability of the organization and therefore more than compensate for the loss of capital. There is a cost to the benefit - it's the classic Cost-Benefit Analysis problem or CoBA. In a tight-margin business, CoBA relies on accurate predicted forecasts. Though, as physicist Niels Bohr once said - "making predictions is difficult - especially about the future".