Catching Up With The CIO

Making the Right Shopping List

The rapid pace of innovation underlines the importance of committing to a product or system, not buying into vendor hype, and scaling down and standardizing whenever it’s practical for your organization. “We’ve been on a journey over the past few years to simplify our environment,” McNulty says. “Last year, we retired our mainframe and standardized on SAP and Microsoft .Net technologies. Standardization should ensure greater supportability.”

Apart from having the potential to make CIOs’ lives easier, standardizing can go a long way toward reducing the total cost of ownership for a given product or platform. “We are counting on technology standardization to reduce our system complexity,” Degeneffe says. “The number of technology choices today makes for a challenging environment. Our simplification strategy is key to getting to a lowest [total-cost-of-ownership] platform.”

However, because of the complexity of some fields, standardization is easier said than done. “Today there are about a hundred electronic medical record vendors, and we expect to see consolidation in that industry,” Ross says. “Health care will fail without standards like those found in finance, telecommunications, travel, or just about any other sector. It is the place where we lag the most.”

In fact, when asked about the challenges CIOs anticipate facing in the future, standardization is near the top of the list, along with cost management, leveraging technology investments, ensuring strong security measures, and continuing to procure capital funding for major IT investments.

“As global competition and price pressures evolve, the IT organization’s ability to support rapid changes in business needs and processes will be paramount to our success,” Brady says. “IT will be required to bring innovative architectures and application solutions to bear at an ever-increasing pace.”