January 5, 2004—Market research specialist Gartner has drawn on group wisdom to offer a list of resolutions for the New Year. Targeted initially at IT directors, the advice is nevertheless applicable to all companies involved in looking for solutions through outsourcing.
With business re-alignment and market competition both continuing to intensify, and providers re-focusing and re-structuring, 2004 will bring some challenges, says Gartner’s research managing vice president John Mahoney. In response, organizations “must continue robust management of short-term issues, prepare responses to trend shifts that drive business complexity and uncertainty, and invest for the future. In short, they need to cut costs and innovate simultaneously,” he adds.
In this context, some of the top 10 must-do resolutions for 2004 are:
- Maintain cost discipline, rationalize and consolidate further
- Refresh hardware bought before 2000
- Assess imminent trend shifts in business and technology
- Anticipate external drivers of uncertainly and complexity
- Invest in mid-term opportunities, pull back from short term expedients
- Migrate toward real time infrastructure
- Create a business process skills competency center
Gartner argues that short-term thinking now needs to be replaced with broader, more strategic planning. A major focus is set to be business processes, specifically how they are sourced and operated. However, Gartner believes that many organizations do not have sufficient in-house knowledge to achieve the necessary improvements. It suggests setting up dedicated business process competency groups to support initiatives in process change, whether this involves outsource partners or not.
Gartner also projects that by 2005 more than 25% of IT capital budgets in the great majority of large and mid-size organizations will be directed to transforming the enterprise using external partners. In-house managers should therefore champion the opportunities of business partnership strategies enabled by IT, the researchers argue.
—Elliott Chase
Reprinted with permission; copyright 2004 i-FM
