The New IT by Jill Dyché

Author:Jill Dyché
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education LLC
Published: 2015-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Infrastructure and Platforms

In their book IT Savvy, MIT professors Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross say this:

Infrastructure investments are the foundation of the IT portfolio. The justification for these investments is sometimes cost reduction. Investments that standardize and consolidate technologies should reduce non-discretionary spending.4

Is it any wonder businesspeople don’t consider IT sexy? Nevertheless, in today’s digital era when social media interactions generate more records than telephone calls, someone needs to keep the lights on in IT. But even IT leaders steeped in the orthodoxy of centralized IT, with its incumbent legacy mainframes and multi-petabyte data warehouses, realize that in order to build something new, you might need to break something old.

A recent problem at a specialty retailer illustrates this conundrum. The CIO is under pressure from merchandisers to deliver a mobile app that allows the retailer to know when the customers are actually shopping in the store. This will allow the retailer to push real-time digital coupons to those customers based on where they’re shopping. This practice, known as geofencing, will also help the retailer modernize its loyalty program by measuring how long shoppers linger in certain aisles. The goal is to incent these shoppers to purchase products in categories where they don’t typically buy. Eventually, the retailer would also like to influence shoppers who aren’t yet in the store by using wireless and GPS technologies to learn when a consumer is in the vicinity of a store, attracting them with promotional offers sent to their smartphones.

These same stores are running decades-old point-of-sale (POS) systems from multiple vendors. Store managers are crying for “modernization,” while back office programmers responsible for manually reconciling heterogeneous sales data leave the company in frustration. The CIO is torn between delivering innovative digital marketing capabilities and catering to traditional expectations to maintain a legacy infrastructure that is deteriorating in lockstep with the confidence of his peers.

Infrastructure still matters. As tech-savvy employees eye jobs at coastal startups with their idea incubators, smoothie bars, and take-your-dog-to-work cultures, leaders across business and IT struggle with automating operations, while at the same time encouraging innovation with no new headcount on the horizon. The challenge for IT leaders is to support infrastructures while finding new avenues for increasing economies of scale and operational efficiencies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.