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V. Rishi Kumar

Call it the `cobbler syndrome.' The chief information officer is so busy fitting out other departments that he doesn't align the IT department with a company's overall business goal.

CALL it the cobbler syndrome - the cobbler is so busy fitting out his customers that you seldom see him measuring his own needs. In precisely such a predicament is today's chief information officer or CIO. Today's CIOs, in their quest to provide technologies and solutions to streamline business processes, seem to be overlooking the need to align their IT processes to changing business.

Hence we have an enterprise-wide resource planning (ERP) plan for manufacturing, an ERP for sales-related automation, for customer relationship management, to handle financials, and ERP for HR and payroll management and practices, but none to handle a company's IT resources and technology infrastructure.

To fill just this need, a new business stream has come into play with players like Euclid Inc, a provider of integrated IT business management software, seeking to align IT services with business goals. Sateesh Andra, Co-founder of Euclid, says in the last five years, the headlines have been of start-ups that fizzled out. A careful examination of why many failed while some survived the bubble yields valuable lessons. Rather than dismissing this period of business history as `yesterday's business,' Andra says "we should look at it as an opportunity to learn how to ensure the success of enterprises."

According to Andra, start-up failures boil down to management issues rather than mere technology. And Euclid seeks to help companies understand the challenges and opportunities that arise from business-centric IT management and to provide superior `IT Governance' or IT management.

In a business environment where risks are on the rise, CIOs need to constantly extract the most out of technology investments. Hence they need to align the overall IT architecture with the business so that the company gains measurable value. A common theme that confronts global 2000 corporations is that of CIOs and top IT managers managing the infrastructure across applications in spite of the fact that the issues confronting each department are different. Therefore, the effort is now on to ensure that all the IT investments are serving the objective they have been invested for over the last few years. Euclid says its products will help companies measure and manage its IT performance. Also, by analysing data across various departments, a CIO can leverage information and thereby streamline the overall functioning as also make a case for business value creation.

The only language IT managers understand and appreciate these days is with regard to RoI (return on investments) and maximising business value. This means better communication in a large enterprise and simplification of governance by aligning IT with disparate business applications while optimising the use of technology resources.

After the 2001 terror attacks on the US, the way large corporations, Governments and IT managers work has changed drastically. The new scene calls for rebuilding public networks, for better storage and more secure infrastructure. For instance, for global 2000 corporations that spend in excess of about $100 million per year on IT, even a saving of about $3-4 million per annum makes a business case to streamline their processes. Two distinct models are emerging: the IT departments of large corporations set up their own goals and deploy new products that facilitate in risk management and bring in better controls and compliance into the system, or they outsource the infrastructure management wherein this could be handled as an ASP (application service provider) model. These products are platform-independent and can be deployed through what is being termed as packaged implementation.

According to research agencies, including the Meta group, this emerging space of aligning IT with business is set to have potential in excess of $2 billion. Gartner, Giga and Meta are bullish and a trend analysis has indicated that 70 per cent of CIOs believe that this decision support system driven by metrics is good enough to justify investments in this new space.

vrishi@thehindu.co.in

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