Survival of the fittest is a well-established notion since the dawn of time. As environments changed over time organisms that could not adapt and evolve to the new normal became extinct and disappeared. A recent study conducted by CA Technologies, Tech Insights Report: The Changing Role of IT and What to Do About It, provides both a wakeup call and some guidance for CIOs and IT leaders not wanting to follow the path of the dinosaur to extinction.
CIOs have been struggling for years to shed the image of being super technologist who advanced to the management ranks. Today’s CIO must add value by first understanding the business strategy and objectives and work in partnership with the business units to achieve those objectives. In this new normal, the CIO must be able to demonstrate IT's contribution to the business while managing business service delivery both inside and outside the walls of the datacenter.
The study found vast differences in the perception of how well IT is serving the business with the CIO having a much more favorable view than their non-CIO business partners.
Adding to this challenge for the CIO is that today’s tech-savvy Line of Business Owner (LOB) understands the value that technology can provide. These LOB managers are focused on delivering new and innovative services to attract new customers, and retain existing customers to grow the business. They are keenly aware of the importance of understanding the customer experience and the role of IT services in helping assure customer expectations are achieved or exceeded. They are also willing and able to circumvent IT if they feel their service delivery needs can’t be met internally. Successful CIOs will adopt and promote best practices to help fuel business growth.
One area where the application of best practices can help is Application Performance Management (APM). Using real-time metrics about the actual end-user experience, IT can demonstrate that they are meeting or exceeding Service Level Objectives (SLAs) negotiated with the LOB. This can help remove any doubt that IT is delivering as promised.
Additionally APM best practices help IT identify and fix problems faster, often before they even impact the customer. Rapid problem identification eliminates the all-too-familiar war room approach to problem solving. It allows the organization to focus only the necessary resources on addressing a problem. More efficient resource utilization allows organizations to shift more of the “Run” budget to the “Build” budget to focus on delivering those new and innovative capabilities demanded by the LOB and ultimately the customer.
Gaining business support for the IT organization doesn’t just happen, it must be driven by a CIO who understands the business strategy, partners with the LOB, and demonstrates the value-add provided by IT. In doing so CIOs help assure not only their own survival and growth but the overall health and growth of the business.
The good news is CIOs seem to be gaining ground. The number of CIO’s reporting directly to the CEO is up in 2013 compared to 2011.
Paul Ellis is Senior Principal Marketing Manager for CA Technologies in the Application Performance Management Customer Solutions Unit.
The Latest
To help you stay on top of the ever-evolving tech scene, Automox IT experts shake the proverbial magic eight ball and share their predictions about tech trends in the coming year. From M&A frenzies to sustainable tech and automation, these forecasts paint an exciting picture of the future ...
Incident management processes are not keeping pace with the demands of modern operations teams, failing to meet the needs of SREs as well as platform and ops teams. Results from the State of DevOps Automation and AI Survey, commissioned by Transposit, point to an incident management paradox. Despite nearly 60% of ITOps and DevOps professionals reporting they have a defined incident management process that's fully documented in one place and over 70% saying they have a level of automation that meets their needs, teams are unable to quickly resolve incidents ...
Today, in the world of enterprise technology, the challenges posed by legacy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) systems have long been a source of concern for IT departments. In many instances, this promising solution has become an organizational burden, hindering progress, depleting resources, and taking a psychological and operational toll on employees ...
Within retail organizations across the world, IT teams will be bracing themselves for a hectic holiday season ... While this is an exciting opportunity for retailers to boost sales, it also intensifies severe risk. Any application performance slipup will cause consumers to turn their back on brands, possibly forever. Online shoppers will be completely unforgiving to any retailer who doesn't deliver a seamless digital experience ...
Black Friday is a time when consumers can cash in on some of the biggest deals retailers offer all year long ... Nearly two-thirds of consumers utilize a retailer's web and mobile app for holiday shopping, raising the stakes for competitors to provide the best online experience to retain customer loyalty. Perforce's 2023 Black Friday survey sheds light on consumers' expectations this time of year and how developers can properly prepare their applications for increased online traffic ...
This holiday shopping season, the stakes for online retailers couldn't be higher ... Even an hour or two of downtime for a digital storefront during this critical period can cost millions in lost revenue and has the potential to damage brand credibility. Savvy retailers are increasingly investing in observability to help ensure a seamless, omnichannel customer experience. Just ahead of the holiday season, New Relic released its State of Observability for Retail report, which offers insight and analysis on the adoption and business value of observability for the global retail/consumer industry ...
As organizations struggle to find and retain the talent they need to manage complex cloud implementations, many are leaning toward hybrid cloud as a solution ... While it's true that using the cloud is not a "one size fits all" proposition, it is clear that both large and small companies prefer a hybrid cloud model ...
In the same way a city is a sum of its districts and neighborhoods, complex IT systems are made of many components that continually interact. Observability requires a comprehensive and connected view of all aspects of the system, including even some that don't directly relate to its technological innards ...
Multicasting in this context refers to the process of directing data streams to two or more destinations. This might look like sending the same telemetry data to both an on-premises storage system and a cloud-based observability platform concurrently. The two principal benefits of this strategy are cost savings and service redundancy ...
