The Role of IT is Indeed Changing: IT needs to be the key advisor as technology becomes the business

Indian IT leaders expect to invest 65% of their IT budget in delivering new services, the highest in the world. As software-driven business transformation becomes the norm, and businesses use new applications to engage their employees and customers, this trend is expected to continue, and accelerate, in the years to come. With the focus on innovation, 71% of India Inc’s top management considers IT to be fundamental to the organization’s success or very strategically important, compared to 51% in the United States.

What IT should be doing Now?

Managing the changing role of IT isn’t about control; it’s more about embracing what could become of today’s technology experts and how they can evolve into strategic business partners.

Drive better engagement with business stakeholders: IT needs to define strategic initiatives in the  context of business goals and communicate performance against strategic metrics so the business can understand IT’s value. IT should move beyond internally-focused metrics to external business metrics such as revenue and customer satisfaction, and routinely measure and report on key performance metrics in the language the business will understand.

Gain business support for the IT organization: Now that more CIOs are reporting directly to their CEOs they have the opportunity to become an equal, strategic partner who delivers clear value to the business and in return garners the budget and support needed to implement the strategy.

Build trust with the business by increasing transparency into investments and priorities: Help the business understand how you can optimize resource utilization and spend across internal and cloud service providers, make sourcing decisions based on a true understanding of cost and value and minimize budget variance and schedule uncertainty.

Identify the key roles that drive innovation and invest accordingly: IT organizations will always have to maintain existing technology investments and support end-user needs, but that shouldn’t be the primary role going forward. Search for the IT rock stars in the organization, give them time and resources to deliver new products and services, and truly innovate. As you shift more of your energy and focus to new services, over time your budget balance will shift from maintenance to innovation.

Educate the business on disruptive trends: IT organizations should understand how new technologies can drive business success. Stay on top of the latest technologies and invest in the required skills, talent and training. Don’t wait to be asked by the business about cloud computing, Big Data or mobility, for instance; look for ways to collaborate with the business in developing a proactive plan to leverage them.

Evolve IT from support to strategist: Today IT is the “problem fixer”; IT is the go-to for customer complaints; and IT maintains systems. But tomorrow IT needs to be the strategy expert. IT needs to be the key advisor as technology becomes the business.

For more details visit us @www.urssystems.com

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Transforming Business Performance: As important as the network is, the applications running atop that network are even more important

Businesses are rapidly adopting virtualization, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS applications broadly across the enterprise to minimize costs and enable seamless collaboration and communication. This is significantly straining the traditional network paradigm. IT organizations globally are faced with the challenge to transform network architectures to deliver the right performance and reliability cost-effectively while retaining control.

Market forces driving change include:

• Decreasing cost and increasing reliability of Internet infrastructure 

• Growing diversity of applications, data, and devices across all networks

• Accelerated adoption of private and public cloud computing infrastructure

In a world combining public and private resources, the network itself needs to get hybrid, combining the strengths of the highly reliable Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks with the ubiquity and lower cost of Internet infrastructure. However, change towards more complex network architectures requires planning.

Top 3 IT considerations:

• Identify and Prioritize Applications: Identify, prioritize, and optimize applications to deliver the best performance. Understand application criticality by business, usage patterns and trends, and bandwidth consumption. Understand the current network delivery path and define the optimal delivery path in a Hybrid Network architecture — whether the internal Ethernet network, the wide- area MPLS network, a virtual private network or a hybrid cloud network.

• Define and Establish SLAs for Users and Businesses: Collaborate with line of business owners to identify, define, and establish right application-level Quality of Service (QoS) to ensure the right performance, reliability, and disaster recovery required for the target end users and business processes. This will influence network policies, network architecture design, and network capacity planning in relation to the cost.

• Real-Time Monitoring and Performance Management: Implement new or augment existing tools to gain application level and network visibility for real time performance monitoring to aid in troubleshooting and maintaining service level agreements (SLAs).

In aggregate, the network is more complex than ever before with the addition of hybrid networks that

incorporate the public Internet infrastructure as a way to scale corporate bandwidth cost-effectively. Supporting this architectural transformation requires IT to not only adopt new capabilities but to also

re-evaluate the existing infrastructure design, deployment, and management to maximize the utilization of hybrid resources. This perspective focuses primarily on the results of the technology like performance, reliability, and user productivity. As important as the network is, even more important are the applications running atop that network.

URS Systems also helps IT analyze the enterprise ecosystem across all network links and applications, whether extending to cloud systems or branch offices. It can analyze the most important applications affecting users and IT, from Microsoft productivity applications to accelerating applications in virtualized data centers running on VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V platforms.

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Role of IT in building SMART CITY in India:

Information and communication technologies will be deeply embedded in the fabric of both old and new cities and will change the way we think of city operations and how we live and work in these environments. One way to fast track planning and construction of such smart cities is to include the private sector in India within a given framework for such new townships by the government. This would need to be specific to the creation of such smart cities in designated areas, so that existing and outdated laws do not become a barrier. These activities would need to be undertaken by approved consortia (consisting of experts in smart city planning/consulting groups/infrastructure and urban developers/IT experts), which would assist in conceptualizing, designing world class smart city clusters.

Creation of such new satellite cities need to be closely tied to the concepts of sustainability. This requires these new cities to be “smart,” i.e. creating new types of transport systems to avoid congestion that is currently so rampant in many Asian towns, construction using low energy housing materials, newer water harvesting techniques and extensive use of IT systems on cloud in running various urban functions and the provision of e-government services to its citizens. Moreover, such cities should be self-sufficient in being able to create gainful employment for residents so that cross city travel is minimized.

India is expected to see massive urbanization along the same lines of what we have seen in China, where urbanization crossed 50% last year and is projected to cross 75% in the next 5 years.

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Department of Telecommunications plans to restructure USO fund modalities

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is working on a plan to restructure the Universal Service Obligation (USO) Fund’s modalities, under which the share of the revenues of private telecom operators will be reduced from the current 5 per cent. DoT will take the final decision in this regard by end-October 2014.

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India is fast emerging as a high-growth market for Cloud Services:

Current Analysis has released its study titled “Enterprise ICT Investment Insights Study 2014” which indicates that cloud computing is the top priority among Indian enterprises. According to the study, a significant 68 per cent of enterprises in India, with 100-plus employees, are using cloud-based services, while the remaining 32 per cent plan to do so over the next 24 months. This is in line with trends in the larger Asia-Pacific market, where the adoption of cloud-based services is as high as 65 per cent. This study spans 19 countries across four key regions.

The study also finds that the scale of cloud services adoption easily surpasses those of other new-generation ICT services, including Big Data and Enterprise Mobility. While 39 per cent of the respondents ranked Cloud as their top investment priority in India, 16 per cent said it would be Big Data while 12 per cent favoured Enterprise Mobility. Network Security jointly ranked as second highest investment priority, along with Big Data.

“India is fast emerging as a high-growth market for cloud services, led thus far by the private cloud segment. “It is highly notable that cloud has emerged as a leading investment priority for Indian enterprises, surpassing even Network Security investments. However, this certainly doesn’t amount to the ICT decision makers lowering their guards when it comes to the all-vital area of IT security.

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Design Once, Deploy Everywhere: Mobile First, It’s time to rethink things

Today's platform developers plan for mobile enterprise applications with the highest levels of security and access control. Soon the enterprise's issue of mobile security will become moot.

In August, a survey by Software Advice showed that only 39 percent of employees work under a “bring your own device” (BYOD) policy for mobile technology in the workplace. More surprisingly, 20% didn't even know whether there was such a policy in their organizations. That means, when it comes to enterprise mobility, employees either are making up their own rules, or just not following any.

At this point, some information security specialists are probably clutching their heads, wondering what these statistics mean for workplace data security in the mobile world. They can breathe easy. Application development technology is getting to the point where businesses simply shouldn’t have to worry about mobile security issues, and can instead focus on driving new business value from mobile channels.

BYOD policies for security and engagement are becoming a thing of the past – as long as forward-thinking companies take a device-agnostic cloud-based approach to enterprise application development.

A new concept -- the enterprise application platform -- will help revolutionize software delivery on the desktop and on mobile devices in the next few years.   An application platform enables the creation of sophisticated and modern custom applications by putting at the developer’s disposal a set of powerful construction tools that are pre-designed for mobile security.

There is so much more to the mobile business environment than instant messages and email. Consequently, more IT departments are starting to think about business value and how their enterprise applications work on mobile devices.

In most cases, the conclusion they've drawn is that enterprise applications are too complex to be rendered on mobile devices. A mobile front end alone is not sufficient (the thinking goes); the entire application likely must be rewritten for the mobile world. But building new applications for each device is a costly proposition.

It’s time to rethink things.

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Telecom Operators are innovating in one space and disrupting in another space, leveraging the cloud technology."

Indian telecom operators are now aggressively investing in cloud strategy to bring innovative services and products to the market while looking to implement data analytics to get more revenue from subscribers. Mobile Phone Operators have realised that their investment in cloud strategy will be very useful for their overall service portfolio.

For instance, European telcos have started innovative services line 'Gaming on Demand', wherein the gaming structure is on a cloud and a user can play it through a remote control by paying a subscription and are expecting the trend to come to India soon.

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DoT to ask global vendors to declare value-addition levels under a self-certification system

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is planning to introduce stringent norms to ensure that foreign telecom vendors meet local value-addition targets to qualify for government contracts under India's preferential market access (PMA) policy.

As per DoT, the global vendors will have to declare VA (value-addition) levels under a self-certification system that will have built-in penalties in case of false declarations and incentives for compliance.

Declared VA levels will be monitored jointly by the DoT's technical wing, the Telecom Engineering Centre, and the Standardisation Testing & Quality Certification directorate, which is part of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology.

The proposed self-certification system is going to be a key element of PMA policy which calls for minimum 30 per cent local sourcing of security sensitive technology products for government contracts across central ministries, excluding defence.

Currently, the consultations are underway to finalise local VA targets for about 23 security-sensitive technology products.

The VA targets and timeframes will be fixed after a thorough assessment of considerations from the global network vendors as well. The previous government had recommended that global vendors meet 45 per cent and 65 per cent of their local value-addition targets by 2017 and 2020 respectively, a suggestion that was met with protests from leading trade bodies across the US, Europe and Japan

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"START SMALL BUT START":

"Information sets you free." Maybe just benchmark fixed vs. variable, or run vs. grow or transform. "You can't manage what you can't measure."

IT has gleefully helped companies use metrics to give other employees and business units the equivalent of a 24/7/365 proctology exam.

"Every publicly traded company today is evaluated from a performance perspective on generally accepted accounting principles" that standardize metrics like income statements, balance sheets, cash flows, and changes in equity. "Those statements provide an apples-to-apples comparison. IT's never had that." It's not that there's no accounting now. But it's too general and not up to the task of metrics-driven decision-making. "Every organization, right now, manages their IT department with a general ledger," he says. "Those general ledgers are insufficient in developing a way to make decisions."

"The discussion of running IT as a business is driven by the business demanding that visibility."

"Start small, but start,". "Information sets you free." Maybe just benchmark fixed vs. variable, or run vs. grow or transform. "You can't manage what you can't measure."

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