Business velocity is inherently a good thing in an increasingly competitive marketplace; but the more you know about the why of what’s happening and are able to predict the when, the greater your advantage. Fundamentally, IT is an ally in solving business challenges. It hasn’t always been perceived that way, but the advent of cloud, DevOps, and more efficient techniques for delivering business solutions has changed IT’s role within the enterprise.
From Maintenance to Strategy
The times of IT spending more than 70% of its time just “keeping the lights on” (maintaining custom legacy applications), has come and gone. Today, IT is likely to define and provide centralized services at a pace that no longer impedes enterprise customer needs, but increases the pace of the entire organization.
For example, let’s take a business in the healthcare industry that faces a broad set of HIPAA regulations governing the privacy of patient health information. Security of health information must be met by the systems for entry and revision of data, storage of data, and communication of data between systems and organizations.
Those systems are generally managed by IT, and it will be IT’s responsibility to build systems and processes required by regulations, including regular compliance audits.
Large or Small Initiatives, Analytics Can Handle It All
To continue the healthcare example, if a different division within the same enterprise initiates a customer-facing services business that accepts credit cards, the enterprise will also be responsible for meeting PCI/DSS regulations
Although these regulations differ from HIPAA, there will be significant operational overlap, allowing IT to reuse procedures and systems to address both regulations at the same time. The earlier each division involves IT, the more leverage IT will be given to resolve each division’s needs quickly.
Of course, not all initiatives are large and needs may be as simple as acquiring a new business application. Unless the application provides the core proprietary function for the business, there are more choices than ever to meet those needs.
For instance, one can still build an internal CRM analytics solution, but TIBCO Spotfire delivers a working solution, allowing you to focus on optimizing customer relations right away.
Your IT organization, assuming it has a strategic perspective and has evolved its systems accordingly, should be your first contact when considering any change that will eventually require IT’s help. IT will be your partner in clarifying requirements and making sure changes integrate properly into the enterprise; and it will provide hard-won experience with building effective solutions.
In short, IT will make you look good by helping you solve challenges efficiently and successfully.
For greater flexibility with your data, try Spotfire today for free.
