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 |