Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives
Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.
Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices
Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.
Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices
This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »March 15, 2002 — CIO —
IT’S A DIFFICULT TIME for enterprise IT. Many companies are feeling the weight of cost reduction pressures. No one knows exactly how much chopping and hacking will ultimately be required, so companies go through round after round of relatively small cuts. It’s difficult to think about deriving long-term business advantage from technology with these frequent budgetary bee stings. Yet we know that things will eventually turn around, and the steps taken during difficult times to position the organization could really pay off when economic life gets better.
Most organizations need a bifocal strategy with respect to enterprise IT: short-term cost reduction and long-term competitive positioning. Of course, bifocals can initially be disorienting. What makes for cost reduction is minimal functionality, standards, commonality and low expenditure of labor. What makes for competitive advantage is differentiation, a close fit with the business model and human effort to match strategies to systems. However, I see some near-term approaches that aren’t compromising long-term goals. I’ll also describe some further-out actions that don’t require a lot of spending?at least not today.
Cutting short-term costs with enterprise IT is not a new idea, and we can rely on some time-honored techniques: consolidation, outsourcing, process improvement and so on. Consoli-dation is perhaps the most promising candidate. Most large companies have implemented major enterprise systems with multiple instances or implementations. It’s likely that no great competitive damage will be done by consolidating instances across the organization, and consolidating will save on modification, maintenance, support and software licensing costs.
The cry will go up that "our business is different," but the same cries went up in many companies that put in only one or two instances from the beginning, and everything worked out. Some companies didn’t even consider the possibility early on that instances could be shared, so consolidation should be easy for them. One European company, for example, put in 400 different instances of SAP across its diverse businesses. I’m guessing that there might be enough meaningful variation in the company’s businesses to justify 10 or 20 different instances.
Even consolidating across single modules can save some bucks. A big U.S. bank, for example, let every major business unit decide on its own what systems it needed for human resources. Fortunately, every unit chose PeopleSoft software, but there are minor variations in implementations. Eliminating those variations and operating off one instance for the entire company could save a passel of money, and it’s highly unlikely that the company’s competitive advantage derives from its unique HR system implementations.