Business Outcomes are what Matters
I spent last week in London meeting with IBM Real-time Compression customers and partners and supporting the launch of the new IBM Storwize V7000 (not to be confused with the company IBM purchased a month ago).
While on this trip I met with a great colleague . Matthew is one of the leading technologists working for ComputaCenter in the UK. We spent a couple of hours discussing how the IT business was changing. Once revered and dressed in shirt and tie, the IT manager now is plumber / electrician of the company. The first to get yelled at when systems / applications / devices aren’t working, always lacking resources and always being asked to do more with less. While the plumbing matters, everyone just expects it to work. Like plugging in a phone to a phone jack, users expect a dial tone.
The shift in technology within IT is moving from “What does it cost?”, to “What is the business value I can achieve with this technology?” More and more, especially as we are moving out of this recession, albeit slowly, customers are trying to figure out how to spend less in IT (as a percentage of overall revenue) but increase their business outcome.
If you read the blog post I did last week about Allianz. The goals set forth in IT were to cut spending by 10% each year but increase overall efficiency. How do you do that? New technology is how you do that but it is not sold under the premise of a vendor brining in a new technology that they have developed or acquired, it is about identifying a problem: ‘Our storage growth and management of that growth is costing us too much money’, and then solving that problem with new technology that fits into the business.








