CXOs in the IT Planning Process

By Chris Lofgren
Tue, October 01, 2002

CIO — When people think of the transportation and logistics industry, they usually think of trucks, trains, planes and ships before technology, but the industry has been completely transformed by information technology. My company, Schneider National, was the first company to deploy satellite tracking technology on its trucks nearly 15 years ago, and technology has always been the key enabler in our ability to compete effectively for the privilege of managing our customers’ freight and logistics operations.

During the past six months, Schneider executives have spent a lot of time on the strategic planning cycle designed to drive our company’s three-year business plan. As part of that work, we reviewed and discussed the vital linkage between business strategy and IT strategy. It should come as no surprise to readers of this magazine that business and IT strategies are inseparable. My goal here is to shed some light on how to successfully connect the two within the strategic planning process.

While it may seem painfully obvious to CIOs, many companies still do not recognize the full potential to be gained from integrating IT decision making with overall business planning. The integration should begin with a clear idea of the business goals and key operating metrics that are the source of competitive advantage for the company. This process, in turn, drives the long-term vision for IT infrastructure and application development, which should be treated as key platforms that drive long-term positioning of the company. As such, business unit leaders must work together to formulate IT plans that support their individual groups, then roll up those plans into the overall corporate operating plan for IT.

Ideally, business managers should be deeply involved in establishing the case for IT investment, and they must prove that the technology is not only needed but will provide a sufficient ROI through lower costs or increased revenue. However, in most companies, the business units invariably want more technology than the IT department can reasonably design, build and deploy in a given year, and their wish lists usually cost more than the company can afford. So the methods that drive prioritization and funding are critical to reaching the end state of having the right IT projects to support the company’s growth strategy. In most cases, the factors for these decisions are not technological, but strategic and financial.

The linkage to business strategy demands that IT investments meet at least one of the following four criteria if they are to be part of a long-term IT strategy and worthy of capital investment.

Continue Reading

As you know, everything is mobile, connected, interactive, and immediate. This is exactly why organizations need a highly agile IT infrastructure in order to keep pace with extreme fluctuations in business demand. This book will help you understand why infrastructure convergence has been widely accepted as the optimal approach for simplifying and accelerating your IT to deliver services at the speed of business while also shifting significantly more IT resources from operations to innovation.
For this white paper, IDC performed an in-depth analysis of the business value of VMware View, defined as the expected ROI associated with the use of the solution as a platform for the targeted deployment of a virtual desktop infrastructure.
This paper explains virtualization, its benefits for mid-sized business and how IBM's virtualization strategy can help these companies reduce costs, improve services and simplify management.
Forrester Research makes recommendations on best practices to optimize branch virtualization and consolidation initiatives. See how a "thin" branch architecture, with key servers, services and applications in the data center that relies on a high-performing WAN connection, can offer the greatest efficiencies.
When trying to achieve continuous compliance with internal policies and external regulations, organizations need to replace traditional processes with a new best practice approach and new innovative technology, such as that provided by IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager.
IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager helps organizations automatically manage patches for multiple operating systems and applications across hundreds of thousands of endpoints regardless of location, connection type or status.  
Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as support considerations
Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business
Applications are changing - they're increasingly web-oriented, global in nature and run from multiple device types. Additionally, the volume of data is growing exponentially every year. How do you ensure your applications have fast, accurate, up-to-date information in this new world? Modern applications are data-intensive; delivering data the old way using monolithic databases isn't working. What's needed is a modern approach to data. One that scales-out as needed and delivers predictable high performance, but without sacrificing data consistency or integrity.
VMware View™ 5 simplifies IT management while increasing end user freedom by delivering desktop services from your cloud. Building upon VMware's leadership in desktop virtualization, VMware View 5 delivers a high-performance user experience while giving IT greater policy control.

View this webcast and find out how VMware View 5 can help you:
- Deliver the highest fidelity experience of desktop services across any device and any network
- Simplify and automate IT management, security and control of desktop services
- Reduce the costs associated with your desktop environment
IT professionals are being asked to deliver faster "time-to-value" than ever before. An IDG Research survey found that CIOs are eager to invest in technologies that will enable them to get new applications and services up quickly, achieving faster time-to-value.
Learn how to reduce IT management overhead, ease revision control, guarantee data security, scale systems more quickly and reduce server and software costs.
Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter
  1. View all Newsletters | Privacy Policy
Resource Center