Are shifting priorities limiting IT's ability to innovate?

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6 November

Business leaders realize IT innovation is necessary to drivebusiness success. Yet the vast majority of Frontline workers say they spendover half their time on routine maintenance and emergencies, leaving littletime for innovation and transformation. IT wants to innovate — but what do they need to succeed?

Currently 6 replies

Tom Murphy

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Name: Tom Murphy
Company: BPI Network
Job Title: Editorial Director
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Tom Murphy 8 years ago

The good news is that if companies outsource their datacenters, they they can cut back on maintenance duties and their IT teams can focus on more innovative ventures.

Blessing Gammel

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Name: Blessing Gammel
Company: BPI Network
Job Title: Sr. Marketing Coordinator
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Blessing Gammel 8 years ago

It's difficult to identify every factor that contributes to the lack of time for innovation - but outsourcing datacenters is a good step in the right direction to free up time for companies to focus on their core competencies.

Tom Murphy

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Name: Tom Murphy
Company: BPI Network
Job Title: Editorial Director
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Tom Murphy 8 years ago

"It's difficult to identify every factor that contributes to the lack of time for innovation - but outsourcing datacenters is a good step in the right direction to free up time for companies to focus on their core competencies. "

- text quoted from Blessing Gammel

That's true, Blessing. The "time-savers" will vary from company to company. One may be able to farm-out some application development work while another can ask outsiders to help with data management. I know companies that have outsourced IT service work so that its experts can concentrate on higher-level tasks. It's important for CIO/CTOs to look at the full range of chores at each company to determine which requires in-house staff and which may be done by outsiders with greater cost-efficiency.

Umeah Patel

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Name: Umeah Patel
Company: Eaton
Job Title: GM.
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Umeah Patel 8 years ago

In order to keep pace with innovation in the IT space, there is an opportunity to leverage expertise and experience from vendors. The frontline workers should take the opportunity to supplement vendor expertise with business-specific knowledge to develop innovative solutions.

Tom Murphy

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Name: Tom Murphy
Company: BPI Network
Job Title: Editorial Director
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Tom Murphy 8 years ago

I absolutely agree, Uhmeah. Trusted vendors can be a great asset to help decide requirements for a big project, but only someone inside the organization knows the detail that is needed to assure the project will meet objectives. Vendors cannot do that without the help of frontline workers.

clive hawkins

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Name: clive hawkins
Company: Wyndham Vacation Resorts Asia PAcific
Job Title: Director IT
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clive hawkins 8 years ago

The challenge is multi-fold, 1, financial constraints (trying to do more with less or the same), 2 Rapid rate of change (increasing support / maintenance work) 3, Maintenance of ageing systems, 4, Business needing to change quickly to keep ahead / respond to disruptive challenges etc.

One option is to move to enterprise standard cloud platforms. Generally these platforms are very flexible allowing for change quickly, the provider is keeping the hardware and software current, you are one of many users so there are few if any problems, supplier enables growth etc.

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