IT holds the keys to business survival
With the economic crisis showing no signs of ending soon, the only certainty in the next 12 months will be uncertainty.
Clearly, financial services firms will be hardest hit, but the knock-on effects will be widespread.
However, past experience suggests that innovative users of IT will be best positioned to emerge the strongest from troubled times.
The constraints within which IT leaders will have to operate will test many. Capital expenditure will be tightly controlled, and considering that most major hardware purchases and often large software licence deals too are financed through leasing, with the cost of debt so high the options will be limited.
For small or medium-sized businesses, there will inevitably be a lot of interest in software-as-a-service, hosting, cloud computing and other online pay-as-you-go offerings that minimise or even avoid an up-front payment.
For bigger businesses, the spectre of outsourcing will loom large. There aren’t many major firms that have not outsourced at least some aspect of their IT operations already, and the potential for budget cuts and the conversion of direct costs to operational expenses gives a financial imperative that may be hard to argue against.
But there are plenty of technology options too. There is no silver bullet, no next big thing that IT leaders can turn to. But there are still plenty of current big things that offer significant potential savings virtualisation, voice over IP and mobile working, to name but three of many.
Whatever route you prefer to choose, there is one action that all IT leaders need to take.
In previous downturns, there was much talk of bridging the IT-business divide to survive unscathed. Yet here we are again, and still the gap often seems as wide as ever.
There will rarely be a better opportunity for IT to work with its business counterparts to plot a route through all the current uncertainty. Let’s not waste this chance to cross that divide and close it once and for all.



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