06.16.04
Navigating
The Outsourcing Map
FASTER TIME TO market, a more linear and predictable cost model than
insourcing, and access to a better-trained resource when discreet
skill sets are required.
Sound like a dream? Actually, those are three competitive advantages
that Keith Morrow, vice president of information systems at convenience
retailer 7-Eleven, says outsourcing can deliver.
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The Whole Article
Start-up
Finalizes Suite of IT Management Apps
Start-up vendor ITM Software Corp. has completed the development of
an integrated suite of IT management applications that early users
and analysts said is something akin to an ERP system for CIOs.
The ITM Business Suite is a set of five software modules designed
to help IT executives manage vendor relationships, project portfolios
and the process of aligning internal IT skills with business needs.
Last month, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company added an IT governance
and regulatory compliance application and formally announced the entire
suite.
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The Whole Article |
HP
Aims To Link IT Platforms And Business
Hewlett-Packard will unveil several new offerings at its Software
Forum in Montreal on Tuesday designed to broaden its Adaptive Enterprise
effort and provide greater linkage between business processes and
IT platforms.
"Business and IT should be synchronized to capitalize on ongoing
change," says Bill Emmett, chief solutions manager at HP's management
software organization. "We want to take more steps towards providing
a very comprehensive way of realizing the core value proposition that
[process] management provides in dynamically linking business and
IT, Management software provides that link--we're taking a business
process and understanding its technical enablement for IT and its
overall business impact."
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The Whole Article
IT
and the Channel Do Matter
According to Harvard Business Review's editor-at-large, Nicholas Carr,
IT doesn't matter. Since IT is ubiquitous, it has no strategic value
or competitive advantage, only high cost and potential downside. Carr's
assumption is that scarcity is the essence strategic value. "You only
gain an edge over rivals by having or doing something they can't have
or do." To use Carr's logic, since every company has channels and
salespeople, channels must be strategically insignificant. After all,
the idea of channels is as old as Satan using Eve to sell Adam a bite
of the apple.
Carr further argues the following points in his article and blossoming
book and consulting business:
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The Whole Article
Across
the digital nation: Outsourcing pool: Local govts. swim, states test
the water
Information technology outsourcing is a tough sell in the state and
local government marketplace.
Public-sector organizations embrace consulting and systems integration
work, often mislabeled as outsourcing, for turnkey projects, but there
is usually stiff resistance to transferring management of IT operations
to a third-party vendor in a multiyear contract (true outsourcing).
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The Whole Article
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Putting
IT Theory Into Practice
For the past two decades, IT survival has meant management organized
and optimized around specific IT resources, such as networks, PCs,
databases and Unix servers. But as executives now know, the rules
have changed -- someone moved the cheese. CIO survival requires strategies
that are less technology-focused and more aligned with initiatives
and services that are meaningful to the business.
CIOs are responding. They've created liaisons with business units
to determine overall IT strategies and ways IT improvements should
be reported to the business. Why then aren't these new strategies
put into practice more often? It turns out that creation of a brilliant
IT-business alignment strategy is the easy part. The bigger challenge
is getting the strategy implemented and accepted within an IT organization
that's currently operating with a different set of criteria.
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The Whole Article
Read this newsletter at:
http://www.itmanagementnews.com/2004/0616.html |
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