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Business Technology
July 2011
an independent report from lyonsdown, distributed with the sunday telegraph
Industry view take an approach to their use of IT that is no more common sense than that home assembly model? It is impractical for users to attempt this integration, but for large end-to-end vendors, such as Oracle, which provides hardware and software systems to industries around the world, it can be very straightforward as the company can develop and acquire the individual building blocks and provide pre-integrated solutions. CIOs and IT directors then also have the benefit of a single point of contact to deal with across their entire IT estate. By taking an integrated approach to technology provision, business can deliver true agility. New ideas can be implemented more quickly and competitive advantage can be achieved. A recent research report from Oracle, Performance management: an incomplete picture, showed that on average businesses can take nearly 18 months to identify and correct a failing process or initiative, simply because they must wade through the complexity of their systems. Technological advances and consolidation in the IT industry have enabled organisations to get the tools they need for the job at hand. Working with one trusted partner, rather than dozens of competing vendors, provides an agile integrated infrastructure, designed and built to work together. Oracle’s product strategy provides flexibility and choice for customers across their IT infrastructure. And even small improvements in IT can bring about major changes for the business. Shaving days or weeks off the decision-making process by having business intelligence systems which truly provide what their name suggests, in a challenging economy, can have a dramatic effect. The key to business intelligence and the value it can deliver is in providing employees with live data, relevant to the decisions they must make and ensuring that data talks to other critical systems.
Joined-up thinking Integration has to be at the heart of any business – that’s why Oracle is helping companies change their approach to IT
A changing workforce
Many organisations today still see IT as a cost centre – a bottomless pit into which they must keep shovelling their budget. A progressive minority, however, see that IT can deliver real, quantifiable value. At the heart of the value IT can deliver is business agility. The rapidly changing business climate means companies must find ways that enable them to adeptly sidestep obstacles to success and react quickly to challenges and opportunities when they arise. Of course the IT industry is not without blame in having contributed to a widening turning circle for many businesses. There is cash in complexity – a fact which is inextricably linked to the perception of IT as a cost centre. In recent years, we have seen a period of significant focus on best of breed systems – the best customer relationship management (CRM), the best enterprise resource planning, the best hardware – from multiple vendors and with very little integration between them.
If there is little integration it is the equivalent of a group of brilliant people who will not work or communicate with one another A result of this has been IT staff spending 60-80 per cent of their time and budget just keeping the lights on and servicing the inherent complexity in such a piecemeal approach to buying and bolting on new systems and applications. Furthermore, this situation means that IT departments are unable to fully use technology to drive growth and improve performance. To redress the balance, businesses need to become more agile. Having the best systems in
place sounds like a fine approach but if there is little integration then it is the equivalent of a group of brilliant people who will not work with one another, or even communicate with each other. A retailer that wants to link customer payments with incentive schemes, for example, may be unable to achieve this easily without having CRM systems in place that talk to its finance system. It can be done, but not without heavy investment of time and resource.
Integration is key
If IT systems were engineered to work together from the outset, requests from the business would take hours to implement rather than days, weeks or even months. If you think about how most people buy cars, they do not buy different parts from different companies and then charge somebody with piecing them together at great additional cost. So why do businesses
Creativity, communication and collaboration within the organisation are essential, from ensuring that colleagues can work seamlessly with the same data sets to making sure they can interact with colleagues as easily as they do with friends in their personal lives. It must all be joined up, or the risk is that data begins to gather and age in silos. This goes beyond just employees suppliers and customers also want to be able to communicate with an organisation in a way that best fits their needs and an organisation needs to be able to respond in the same channel. This multi-channel approach is impacting on businesses and ultimately their systems. No longer can a business continue to implement isolated systems without the integration layer.
Introducing agility
So how can businesses achieve agility? The answer lies in provisioning. Businesses need to work with hardware and software companies and strategic partners who have already done the legwork for them. The infrastructure needs to be ready to go, no matter what challenge the business places on it, and staff must be freed up to focus on growth, not maintenance. Alan Hartwell, Oracle VP Technology Solutions & Channels UK region. www.oracle.com