SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS As more and more corporations enter the global marketplace, the need to manage internal IT complexity, infrastructure, and increased service delivery will become paramount. Geographical borders are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Senior management are fully aware that they will lose customers to their competitors if they do not supply supreme quality service, yet without the dependent IT technology to implement that service, there is no way of providing it. The retention of customers is something that corporations ignore at their peril. Every department, not just IT, must work towards retaining customers. Customers constantly change their habits. They know they have the power. They can shop for the best prices, discounts, and contracts and are constantly looking for the best deal. They are very unforgiving and will tell the world when you disappoint them. Most corporations began their e-business journey at a time when the economy was booming in the middle half of the 1990s. Business was booming, profits were good, and the outlook was positive. Many things have changed since them and the circumstances are much different. As discussed in Chapter 4, after the shakeout of the Internet stampede, we now have a greater understanding on how the marketplace changes rapidly and the need to adjust quickly. Adapt or die! Today, few CIOs would disagree with the need for more sophisticated and less complex business-oriented delivery models. As e-business evolves in many different ways, a unifying structure for IT is needed. This structure should have the following components: -
Proactive, sophisticated tools— The IT department must embrace the application of more intelligence and automation to the problems of managing the complexity and infrastructures that they have developed. There is a growing realization that this is inevitable. IT vendors are coming to the same conclusion, so new products and services will begin to appear. -
Fewer resources— To reduce costs and solve problems, it is desirable to let automation handle operational and technology problems, thus freeing staff to concentrate on the business itself. -
Flexibility of standards— There is still a pressing need to integrate the many different vendors, products, and protocols, so they can work more easily together. This may be the root of the complexity problem. There is no "one size fits all" model. Software vendors must work together to solve this problem. National and international standards must be agreed to and implemented. -
Wider markets— Products and solutions must be aimed at a wider market. Global corporations are not the only markets that have complexity, infrastructure, and service delivery problems. Small- to medium-sized businesses suffer the same pressures as their larger competitors. The problems are universal, and it is not only the large corporations that will benefit from the new e-business models. IT vendors must address this. -
Ease of implementation— The new business models must have better and more successful implementation methodologies. Much-needed repeatable processes will enhance and make implementation easier and safer. If a product is not easy to implement, it will be an agent of increasing the complexity. Graduated levels of implementation are desirable. -
Protection and security— If products can provide automation as well as the same levels of protection and security, they are necessary. The same great threats, such as more sophisticated viruses, denial of service, and information theft, will still exist, even in the e-business on demand world. Is this the brave new world? No—it is the logical progression of the marketplace. E-business on demand is a bold initiative and it's a new agenda. IBM's move into on-demand computing is a natural evolution of current initiatives rather than the introduction of a more disruptive technology or theme. It's the next generation of the Internet e-business initiative that began in the middle of the 1990s that we referred to earlier. The underpinnings of eUtility computing have been most clearly articulated in the marketplace by IBM. IBM is offering products and architecture. Web services standards provide interoperability among applications, and initiatives such as Grid Computing will allow distributed computing resources to be shared and managed as a single, virtual computer. Higher bandwidth provides a conduit for all kinds of data and messages to be passed. Early adopter companies are already experimenting with elements of e-business on demand and eUtility computing, selectively outsourcing a portion of business processes and computing applications. Several vendors already offer utility-based pricing for server and storage capacity. Web services and grid protocols are gaining credibility, even at a time when technology spending is mostly confined to the essentials. Autonomic computing plays a key role in dealing with the complexities and costs of managing complex, distributed networks in the e-business on demand world. |
