Nobody is ever satisfied with IT, but unsuccessful projects only reflect the organization’s disfunction

Another day, another survey announcing disconnect between IT and the business. A new report from Forrester shows high levels of dissatisfaction on both sides, and suggests more “integrated thinking” is needed.

The sound bite coming out of a new survey of 474 IT executives conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of EffectiveUI is that only 39% believe their internal IT organizations have the ability to regularly deliver projects on time and on budget.

There’s actually nothing new in this finding — in fact, 39% probably is pretty optimistic compared to other studies done over the years, such as Standish Group’s Chaos report, which suggests that only 30% of projects meet their goals.

Still, there are many areas where IT organizations don’t seem to be cutting the mustard. For example, only 43% of the sample report that their IT organizations collaborate with the business on business.

Here’s one that suggests the message of service-oriented architecture or enterprise architecture still hasn’t resonated among a majority of enterprises yet: only 31% report that their departments maintains a clearly defined set of business-centric services that the business can easily understand.”

Still, end-users aren’t making things easier.  The Forrester/EffectiveUI survey suggests organizational dysfunction is what keeps sending IT projects down in flames. More than half of the IT executives, 56% say the biggest issue they encounter is users constantly changing requirements on projects in midstream. Half of the IT leaders also say their departments are overburdened, and they end up “trying to do too much at once.” More than one-third, 34%, believe they lack clear executive direction, while another 34% point to a lack of the right development talent. A similar number, 32%, cite a lack of stakeholder consensus.

As one respondent put it: “The business folks don’t think in terms of what capabilities are nice to have and what are must-haves, and they often give a list of requirements that’s too high-level. This doesn’t help IT get an accurate sense of how technology can help.”

At the same time, business’ satisfaction with IT is lower than 50%. Despite this low level of satisfaction, only 25% of IT decision-makers place top priority on updating and modernizing key legacy applications, and only 20% believe mobile to be of top importance on their list of priorities.

Enterprise customer-facing apps don’t get very high marks from their own creators as well. Only 20% of IT decision-makers surveyed said they were “very satisfied with the user experience of the customer-facing Web applications that are created in-house,” and only 14% were very satisfied with their customer-facing mobile applications.

There’s already too much talk about the “lack of IT-business alignment” that seems to be everywhere. What is needed is common-sense, roll-up-your-sleeves collaboration. The two sides inevitably keep getting closer together, because for many organizations, IT has become the business, and the business has become IT.  Plus, members of GenX and GenY keep moving into positions of responsibility, and they were raised on computers.

But, ultimately, technology is only a tool — it by itself won’t put function into a dysfunctional organization.

The Forrester report isn’t just a gripe sheet. The report’s authors recommend that internal development teams should strive to understand the big picture and take responsibility for not only the creation of the application, but also the impact it has on the business. Here are their three recommendations for increasing collaboration between business and IT:

• “Take back responsibility for great applications with integrated thinking.” Such thinking requires application development teams to understand the big picture and take responsibility not just for building the applications but for their positive (or negative) impact on the business.
• “Task integrated design with people who understand both business and technology.” Great design, the report’s authors say, “comes from people who can enumerate the options, try decisions on for size, and make informed choices that fit within design constraints, but that are consistent with the vision for the final product.” Don’t treat it as just another process.
• “Measure every design decision based on its impact on user experience.”

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

Source: Associated Press

Businesses shouldn’t let outages shake their confidence in cloud

The recent outages of Google and Microsoft’s Outlook.com reinforce concerns many businesses have about relying on cloud services and may cause organizations that have already moved or are considering moving to the cloud to reconsider.

It’s obviously a huge deal when servers or services you depend on are unavailable, and your business is dead in the water at the mercy of a third party. Main problem is when you’re entrust your business to third-party companies and to servers that exist somewhere “out there.”

No server or network is perfect. If a business chooses to manage its own network and servers on premise to avoid the inherent risk of the cloud, there is still an equal possibility of a server or network outage. For many businesses, the risk is actually greater because the cloud provider has trained personnel tasked to maintain the infrastructure 24/7, whereas SMBs tend to just dump IT management in someone’s lap and hope for the best.

There are pros and cons to the cloud, but there are also pros and cons to managing a local IT infrastructure. At easySERVICE data solutions, our cloud-like server is both persistent and highly elastic. You get the best of both worlds since it looks and feel like a traditional server but is on-demand and better than cloud. So no matter what you need something simple or something highly customized and complex, we bring the expertise, support and services that no other provider can deliver.

Whether you are looking for easySERVICE™ Disaster Recovery Planning or solutions for your unique IT requirements, we have a solution specially designed for you.

At easySERVICE™ Data Solutions, we have collected our most noteworthy resources in one convenient disaster recovery guide to answer all your questions and help you decide if launching a DRaaS offering is the right move for you.

Related articles

• Google Goes Down For Minutes, Microsoft’s Outage Lasts For Days (MSFT) (embargozone.com)
• Microsoft restores Outlook.com after three-day outage — sort of (infoworld.com)

Five Signs Downtime May Be a Major Threat to a business

Many organizations may believe that they remain unaffected by downtime issues. After all, few users complain; customers seem happy. Some important signals, however, may indicate that your current situation or availability solution may need re-evaluation.

1. Shrinking Backup Windows—eBusiness and supply-chain processes are putting the squeeze on backup windows. The Gartner Group reports a 66 percent per year decline in the available time for quality backups.
2. Expanded Internet Dependence—As you exploit the internet to improve customer satisfaction and reduce costs, your dependence on internet enabled availability grows exponentially. When email is integrated into business functions to improve customer communications, your dependence becomes even greater. And the risk that downtime poses to the business increases.
3. Globalized Computing—Access to critical data from anywhere in the world improves collaboration and enables faster, more informed decisions. Such dependence requires continuous access to information and applications; therefore the impact of downtime will be enormous.
4. Distributed Applications—New applications are now running across multiple servers simultaneously, enabling them to capitalize on the servers’ varying strengths; however, should one server experience downtime, the entire critical application may go down.
5. Server Consolidation—Server, storage, and data center consolidation projects drive down IT and application costs, but with fewer points of failure a consolidated environment poses a greater downtime risk.

 

Today’s enterprise must be highly resilient and able to anticipate multiple risks. Areas of concern that organizations need to primarily focus on include enterprise and work area risk, availability of critical data and business applications, IT stability, recoverability of IT infrastructure, data backup and disaster recovery. Unplanned outages can also create far reaching consequences that impact your long-term revenue stream, your brand and ultimately, your organization’s survival.

 Business continuity planning is essential to keep your company productive during planned or unplanned disruptions and protect the business from consequences such as financial losses, damaged reputation, weakened customer and partner relationships and lost productivity.

If the unthinkable should occur, discover how easySERVICE™ Data Solutions can help protect your brand and potential revenue by helping you to:

• Assess your risks
• Develop a tailored business resilience strategy
• Safeguard your business-critical information while maintaining continuous operations
• Enable a virtually complete recovery should disaster occur

Contact us TODAY!!.

Are your enterprise cloud plans in synch?

A recent survey shows midmarket businesses have mixed feelings: a majority of business-side executives are “believers” while IT managers are less certain.

Although it’s a subject that gets less coverage than cloud security or reliability concerns, internal battles over who should control the strategy for business applications and services served up via cloud services providers are another factor that tends to get in the way of their deployment.

Some new data from cloud services provider, representing a survey of 1,100 midmarket companies, underscores the point: while 70 percent of the C-level executives at those companies consider themselves “cloud believers” just 55 percent of the IT managers describe themselves in the same way, according to the results.

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that the companies where there were more high-level “believers” tended to have a higher number of cloud services in place than average (3.1 hosted services versus 2.5 services for the average company). Those who were “unconvinced” had fewer (1.3 cloud services).

Approximately 75 percent of the respondents are planning to take on new or additional cloud services in the next three years, the survey shows.

“The survey data reflects what we see in our business every day,” said Guy cloud services provider commenting on the results. “Most organizations already have at least one hosted service running, but not everyone in the organization is in complete alignment regarding putting all of their services in the cloud. Executives want the cost and disaster avoidance benefits while security, privacy and compliance are some initial barriers brought up by the managers responsible for implementation.”

The most likely infrastructure or applications that will go the cloud route? The top priorities are servers/data centers, Microsoft Exchange, co-location and backup, phone systems, and Microsoft Office.

Generally speaking, the data is another reminder that the role of IT manager is evolving quickly. Is it time to get your own team in synch with your company’s cloud services strategy?

Approximately 76 percent of the respondents to cloud services provider’s blind Web-based survey (conducted in May and June 2013) were from companies with between 50 and 5,000 employees.

Share your thoughts in the comments below and don’t forget to like this post.

Source: Associated Press

What firms can do to avoid CLOUD traps..

A lack of standards to facilitate moves between cloud providers doesn’t mean companies are helpless in the face of vendor lock-in.

Cloud computing is a major development in information technology, comparable in importance with the mainframe, the minicomputer, the microprocessor, and the Internet. It has the potential to make an increasingly significant contribution to economic activity throughout the world. This potential will only be realized if cloud computing products and services are portable and interoperable.

Even though a fear of lock-in is hampering uptake, cloud customers could still be doing more themselves to minimise the pain of moving providers.

The Internet is one of the foundations of cloud computing, and is an excellent example of how portability and interoperability can deliver massive benefits. But cloud computing is more than the Internet. The additional cloud components that store and process information, unlike the Internet and web components that they use to communicate and display it, are generally not portable and interoperable today.

The key cloud computing portability and interoperability categories to consider for Cloud Portability and Interoperability are:

• Data Portability
• Application Portability
• Platform Portability
• Application Interoperability
• Platform Interoperability
• Management Interoperability
• Publication and Acquisition Interoperability

Data portability and application interoperability cannot generally be achieved by conformance to interface standards, because each application is different, and uses different data. Integration of applications, and porting of data between them, can, however, be more, or less, expensive, depending on how the applications are designed.

The platform capabilities required by modern cloud solutions are much greater than those of a traditional operating system, and the existing, well-supported operating system portability and interoperability standards are no longer sufficient.

Generic data model and semantic standards can also help reduce costs by enabling the use of powerful data management and semantic processing components.

There are excellent data model standards, but new storage paradigms, requiring new standards, are emerging for cloud. Improved understanding of semantic processing is needed for its benefits to be realized.

The web service protocol interface standards may be applicable, but are not necessarily appropriate. There are no standards for cloud software interfaces.

Detailed advice and recommendations are contained in a free guide to avoiding cloud vendor lock-in just published by The Open Group.

Source: The Open Group