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Are you moving to an Infrastructure as a Service IT model?
As a CIOs do you need to own the IT estate of your organisation? The current economy and increasing business competition is calling for a new approach to infrastructure decisions, CIOs today find themselves at a junction with regard to how they deploy resources. As organisations change their approach to markets, so CIOs may need to consider re-evaluating their infrastructure directions. Turning towards cloud computing and applications delivered as a service could well be the answer, come and join our CIO debate
Or, if you are involved in the email sector and would like to write an article on the future of email, send your thoughts to Mark Chillingworth, editor of CIO.co.uk at mark_chillingworth@idg.co.uk.
This month's CIO UK Debate is the result of a conversation the editorial team had with Adrian Dilworth, the CIO of Vodafone Qatar, the latest network launched by global mobile operator. Dilworth enjoys challenging assumed attitudes and comes at the issue of alignment of IT with the business from a very different angle; he believes that in many cases the business should align with IT.
This radically different view is based on experience, Dilworth insisted in the set up of Vodafone Qatar that there would be no customisation to the Oracle applications. In acquiring the Oracle telecoms set of applications he believes he bought in best practice methods for Vodafone and teams around the business should, and have, aligned their methods with the applications. The results have been successful. Vodafone is a CIO 100 ranked company.
Dilworth was unable to join the original CIO UK Debate with CIOs Rorie Devine and Ian Dobb, but penned his own thoughts below:
I personally regard IT aligning with the business as a shared responsibility that goes both ways. Generally alignment takes a serious amount of work. I have many times seen people who mistake "agreement" for "alignment", or even "communication" for "alignment". Real alignment need to be done at multiple levels and that includes getting down to resources, budget, schedule or priority to deliver it.
The second point of alignment is that you can burn large amounts of time to little effect trying to achieve alignment across large organisations. Organisations are built out of people who will naturally have all sorts of opinions and views. Expecting to align and get agreement with everyone is complete folly. Good organisations should have effective processes that ensure alignment, if not, start by booking an hour with the CEO and work down. You will achieve the result you want a lot quicker than pursuing a "general consensus" approach.
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Chris Puttick | Published: 15:08 GMT, 21 July 2009
I'm with Mr Dilworth on both the need for companies to change practices to best gain from new technology. Also on the need for keeping things modular and separated. One can get far more from heterogeneous systems that can standalone and share data using agnostic messaging systems than you can by integrating on a single development framework e.g. .Net and having everything break at once, locking the organisation to a single supplier, etc. etc..