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Editor's Notes

2 Posts tagged with the public-sector tag

IT’s Role in Business Agility in Editor's Notes

Posted by Paula Klein Oct 3, 2011

Agility — like innovation, productivity and cost-savings — is a must-have at businesses today. If you’re not agile, you’ll succumb to the competition. End of story.

But achieving agility is an ongoing story, and tactics vary company to company and task to task. Although I dislike the overused word “enabler,” IT definitely enables business agility and even has a starring role to play. At the same time, agility itself enables a business to reach its end goals — faster transactions, better productivity and lower costs. Agility results when business operates more efficiently, and therefore, there is no single solution — whether it’s cloud or virtualization or consumer devices — to attain it in an instant. Agility doesn’t come in a box or over the Web; it’s a combination of approaches measured in many ways.

Many business experts offer theories and examples of how to become an agile business. Mark W.S. Chun, Director of the Center for Applied Research and Associate Professor of Information Systems at the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, told me recently that his latest research indicates that, contrary to many beliefs, public-sector IT efforts — particularly in Asia — are often more innovative and agile than those in the private-sector. While lower funding and transient management teams are usually business inhibitors, Chun says that when you’re small and scrappy, you take risks and adopt new ideas quickly — before the next administration, budget cuts or political shift occurs. That may be why mobile technologies and cloud services are being widely embraced by governments and their agencies, he says.

Smart Enterprise magazine will be examining “IT at the Speed of Business” in the latest issue. It includes a profile of Josh Morton, Sprint’s VP of IT Enterprise Services, who must empower its dispersed enterprise to respond faster and with greater agility than ever before. A major re-platforming of the IT infrastructure and a new mobile strategy are under way to meet demands.

At Avis Europe, reexamination of its business processes was a first step toward making effective use of resources and reducing costs to become more agile. Avis deployed CA Clarity™ Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) to manage risk and for visibility of IT service and resource costs.

In the best cases, agility is simply a way of doing business — and it starts at the top level of the organization. In this interview in the MIT Sloan Review, Christian Rynning-Tønnesen, CEO of Statkraft, says: “The ability to create strategies and adapt to changing conditions quickly is critical for maintaining a competitive edge.” Rather than slowing down the company with regulations, costs and overhead, Statkraft is pursuing sustainability to keep it ahead of competitors and its marketplace. “In just two decades Statkraft has grown from a state-owned, Norwegian-focused power supplier to one of the world’s largest renewable power producers,” according to the article.

Look for more articles and blogs about IT-driven agility — including outsourcing trends and the role of Enterprise Architects in making businesses more nimble — in the coming month on Smart Enterprise Exchange. Then let us know some of the ways your IT department is moving rapidly to meet business needs.

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

485 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: sprint, josh_morton, mark_chun, statkraft, avis_europe, infrastructure_agility, ppm, pepperdine, costs, cost_saving, virtualization, cloud, mobile, agility, asia, public-sector

Exchange View, August: Public-sector Jitters? in Editor's Notes

Posted by Paula Klein Aug 12, 2010

August 2010

It seems increasingly evident to me that public sector CIOs have even greater pressures than their private-business counterparts to adopt emerging technologies and cut costs. While carrying out these initiatives, government CIOs must also address constant regulatory issues, e-government mandates, green computing standards and a super-competitive market for new talent.

In particular, government agencies have always struggled to attract new IT staff and retain those at the most senior levels. I was thinking about the high turnover rate among government IT executives when I read about California CIO Teri Takai, who was recently named U.S. Defense Department IT Chief. And more recently, Anne Margulies — former CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts — left her state job for one at Harvard University.

It’s possible that Margulies’ move was already under way when she told attendees at the MIT CIO Symposium in May that her state has had a hiring freeze for the past three years due to budget cuts. In addition, she noted that pay scales were low, and she was worried about "creating a talent pipeline" in light of an aging workforce where half of the state’s employees could retire in the next two years. Perhaps these facts —combined with the impending gubernatorial election in November — prompted her to take a new post in a more stable environment.

Since we have many members around the globe in public and nonprofit organizations, Smart Enterprise Exchange will be exploring some of these topics this month and next. The lessons learned should also be very useful to private sector CIOs even if they have relatively more resources to work with.

In our Professional Development section this month, Steve Ressler, co-founder of GovLoop — a burgeoning social media site for the government community — shares his recommendations for hiring and retaining Net Gen workers. In September, we are happy to feature the views of U.S. government CIO Vivek Kundra, who is determined to counter the traditional inertia and bureaucratic delays so common in large organizations. His efforts to push an agenda of cloud computing and social media as part of President Obama’s “digital administration” are making waves in Washington, D.C. and in the industry. Kundra’s mantra? Cut waste and execute, execute, execute!

We’d like to hear from those of you in the public sector about your experience. What are your challenges and success tactics? Take the poll here and add a comment. If you're in the U.K. government, tell us whether your new administration has had an impact on IT policies. And we’d like to hear from those of you in South America, Canada, Asia, India and Australia, as well. I invite you to share your experiences with me and your peers.

Paula Klein
Editor and Community Manager
Smart Enterprise Exchange

651 Views 0 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: talent, public-sector, government, cloud_computing, e-government, vivek_kundra, california, massachusetts, hiring, turnover, u.k.