I came across an interesting article on CIO Online recently concerning the conundrum CIO’s world over currently face – the drive to innovate, while cutting IT costs. The article resonated with me. In my former life, as Head of IT Operations of a large life insurance business, there was this continual dance between embracing new technolo

gies to facilitate business demand/growth, while squeezing legacy assets and managing an every decreasing IT budget. Today, this is the primary demand from corporates on our services as AgileIT.

I have termed the dilemma CxO Paralysis. The fear is real. A wrong decision or commitment to a long term IT strategy could cost the organisation billions of Rands, not to mention lost time in take to market and sales. Yet, in the face of the same scenario, if basic steps are put in place, transformation can be planned painlessly.

The mistake many businesses make is to throw out legacy investments as part of a five-year refreshment cycle – at huge expense. We have recently saved an organisation half a billion Rand in capital investment in storage alone, by reconfiguring the existing infrastructure and platforms, prioritising the storage requirements and using a multi-medium approach.

“I recommend never throwing anything away! A technology organisation can often find innovation by revisiting old projects, false starts, and work that died on the vine with fresh eyes and new goals. Nobody ever said that innovation means starting from scratch.” Will Kelly, Technology Writer and Content Strategist.

This is the maxim AgileIT swears by – provided you have a plan and measurement and monitoring platform in place and somewhere to aim towards. You can’t plan for cloud service delivery, blockchain, AI or any of the new digitisation buzzwords, without this in place. So, welcome to the dance floor.

First Step: An open mind to do things differently.

Second Step: IT is a service to the business. IT teams need to behave a such.

Third Step: Measure service delivery – many basic services are not measured correctly so their value is never fully derived.

Fourth Step: Mentoring and coaching. Arms length consulting is short-sighted. Be prepared to learn and to grow.

Fifth Step: Make a plan.

When your current IT investments encompassing technology, people and processes are being monitored and measured correctly, you can then manage your innovation strategy and delivery to the business more effectively and save literally 100’s of 1000’s of Rands in the process.

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