The Acid Test for Technology

When times are good and the sales pipeline is overflowing with customer

orders, all technologies deliver what they've promised, or at least appear to.

So during such times, even if the sales team looses a customer because of a

small glitch in your CRM software that failed to raise an alarm at the right

time, it's not really taken that seriously. The sales team doesn't raise hell

with the IT department because there are many more customers waiting in the

pipeline for their order fulfillment. So you either ignore the glitch or send a

small note to the vendor about it and move on with your life. The vendor will

take his own sweet time to rectify the glitch because he's also busy fulfilling

other customer orders.

Now if we apply the same situation during an economic slowdown situation such

as the current one, the answer is quite obvious. The CIO's neck would be on the

line if the company lost a customer because of the CRM software, and its impact

would trickle down to all responsible, including the vendor.

So this is the time to judge the true capabilities of a technology. This is

the real acid test for IT as a business enabler. Now is the time to truly

evaluate all technologies that are currently deployed in your IT infrastructure.

Are they really delivering what they originally claimed to? Are they actually

helping you save costs, improve efficiency and productivity, automate manual

processes, help you generate more business, and deliver all those wonderful

things they originally had promised to? If not, then you know where's the flab

your top management has been asking you to reduce.

The slowdown is therefore like a blessing in disguise for the IT

infrastructure. You get away from the frenzy of deploying new IT projects and

start focusing on how to extract more from what you already have. And

technologies that let you do that take center stage at this point of time. They

are also the ones that are likely to hog all the limelight this year. There are

quite a few out there, and those are what we've talked about in our cover story

this time. One of them, Green IT, is going to remain the focus of all CyberMedia

publications throughout this year. In PCQuest, we'll focus on the greenness of

IT products, how to deploy various solutions, and the cost benefits.

So here's to a very smooth, optimized, and efficient IT infrastructure over

the coming year. Do write to me in case you'd like us to cover anything in

particular that would be useful for your business.

Anil Chopra, Editor anilc@cybermedia.co.in