According to research firm Forrester, the biggest fault of IT management to date has been its failure to build the kind of comprehensive view into IT that allows CIOs to answer basic questions posed by executives, such as “What is everyone working on?” and “Why does that project require more funding?” Ironically, IT provides business managers and executives with an understanding of business events and their consequences via dashboards, but CIOs have been operating blindly.
However, new research from Forrester, entitled “Integrated IT Management Drives Efficiency,” points to a convergence of disciplines that will result in an integrated IT management (IIM) dashboard, allowing IT managers to reduce IT budgets by as much as 30 percent while realizing value increases of 10 to 15 percent in the first year.
“We see IIM as a natural progression of related management and execution practices that will provide a consolidated view across all of IT with fact-based information on spending and human and technical resources,” said Margo Visitacion, Principal Analyst at the research firm. “Without this visibility, CIOs lack the management information required to sit at the executive level, and risk being replaced by someone who can manage resources, whether internally or offshore.”
The ongoing requirement for IT to demonstrate its business value is one compelling reason to bring together operational, new project, and existing system data in a single view. Other trends that drive IIM include the need for IT to:
- Balance resource capacity with resource consumption across the entire organization.
- Rationalize applications, as the effort to maintain existing systems consumes 76 percent of IT budgets.
- Provide end-to-end service levels for business-critical applications due to the advent of service orientation.
Although a complete solution is 24 to 36 months away, Forrester offers evidence of a burgeoning IIM market.