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Now is the time for guidance: improve efficiencies, reduce costs and steer in the direction of your future!


With the financial downturn and slow economic conditions, IT departments need to adopt a strategy that allows them to go beyond simple survival, a strategy that will allow them to flourish and show real leadership. Now that IT is customer facing, the majority of customer interactions, directly or indirectly, depend on good performance and throughput of key business applications. In tough times, service delivery is not the place you want to cut corners.

Focus on investments that really make a difference. Speak in terms the business understands - not technology. Use new techniques to automate the management of service delivery of key applications and workloads. Use proven analytics to predict future service faults and "what-if" technology to insulate service delivery from constant changes e.g. mergers, service consolidations, capacity shifts, new applications, seasonal and event spikes, etc.

The trick it to reduce costs without reducing value and hurting the business.

You need to collaborate with the business to understand business value and fund accordingly. Of course you'll need to start with a clear picture of service delivery by line of business/application over time (past, present, future). Service delivery is the common goal in any dialogue regarding changes either through funding, business demands, competition or technology.

If you can predict the service level and demand on the business, you can make better use of assets and personnel.

It's déjà vu all over again. We've seen this before with the "dot com" meltdown. The net take away lesson from then is just as applicable now. IT must align and provide value to the business. If you're not contributing to the business then you better hide. If IT wants to survive and grow, then lead with aligned, efficient and proactive leadership.

Fire fighting, reacting to service faults and playing the "blame game" provide no business value in good times and will unlikely be tolerated in not so good times. Predicting when application performance will become unacceptable is not random guesswork. It can be predicted mathematically with accuracy.

Unfortunately, we in IT are constantly in react mode. Increasingly, businesses cannot afford to wait and then react to service faults involving critical customer applications. They need to proactively manage and ensure service delivery in a constantly changing environment. This challenge has motivated innovators to look for proactive solutions that provide the time and data they need to make better decision and ensure acceptable service delivery.

How can BEZ help?

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