Is it time to remove IT from the

boardroom agenda?

Today, Information technology (IT) is often on the boardroom agenda

Sadly, it’s usually there because

things have gone wrong

Stuff like…

Board Agenda: IT items for discussion

• Why is the 2010/11 IT budget overrunning again?

• Why has Project X been delayed?

• Why did our website go down last weekend?

• Why has can’t we scale our systems to meet demand?

As a result, many boards view IT as a constant headache that increases costs and upsets not just users but customers

as well.

This is ironic, since the IT industry has been working hard for a decade to raise the profile of IT into a boardroom issue.

It’s now there – but for the wrong reasons.

So, perhaps, now we should be fighting to get IT off the

boardroom agenda

One reason that IT has been regarded as such a source of problems is that many organisations today still have a complex, brittle and siloed infrastructure.

As a result, over 70% of their IT budget is used just ‘to keep the lights on’.

Only 30% is available to support new strategic initiatives.

Our industry has started to respond to these challenges, by reducing the cost of IT and increasing its reliability.

We’ve seen the commoditisation of the IT infrastructure, making hardware more reliable and management software better at mitigating, predicting and preventing failure.

And adopting virtualization, as part of a journey to cloud

computing, has emerged as a major way to significantly reduce IT complexity and

transform its delivery.

Virtualization gives organisations increased availability, business

continuity and security, which all reduce risk for CIOs.

Organisations that have virtualized the majority of

their IT infrastructure are able to deliver IT to the business

as a service, through a private cloud.

This gives the business the agility to scale up and down to meet their changing needs: just what the board wants to

support things like acquisitions, major new contracts, site moves or entry into new

markets.

So, IT should be off the board agenda as a problem and as a technical item.

Instead, it should be recognised as a service that helps to transform the business and drive sustainable competitive advantage.

Changing to this new way of delivering IT will remove IT problems from the board agenda. So, where does this leave CIOs?

VMware UK has written a white paper where we try and answer this question.

You can download the white paper for free by visiting: www.itofftheboardroomagenda.com

We’d also love to hear what you think: if you write or blog

about this subject, we’ll try and include a link to your

article on the experts section of the site.