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New Delhi
July 24, 2008
A recent research from Unisys Corp, involving 1,200 organizations worldwide,
shows significant gaps between executives' business and IT goals and their
estimation of their organizations' ability to achieve those objectives. Those
gaps indicate that executives are not getting the most from their business
initiatives and IT investments, and need new approaches to modernize their
business processes, strategic applications and IT infrastructures to address
their core business challenges.
To help executives close those critical gaps, Unisys has announced the Unisys
modernization benchmark service. Using trend information from the Unisys
research, this service helps organizations benchmark their current business and
IT operations against those of their peers and competitors, exposing the gaps
between their desired state and their current readiness to achieve it. This
enables executives to focus on those gaps, which are likeliest to have a major
impact and identify the business and technology initiatives in which they must
invest-and the ways they must manage those investments to gain the greatest
business advantage in the shortest timeframe.
“Too many IT executives are in a budgetary straitjacket imposed by
constricted notions of how IT can support business,” said Dominick Cavuoto, VP-Global
Industries and Worldwide Strategic Services, Unisys. “They're spending 80
percent of their IT budget on infrastructure maintenance and funding innovation
only as an afterthought. These strictures have been imposed largely by outmoded
views of IT as a cost center, not an investment. The Unisys modernization
benchmark service helps executives find fresh ways of thinking so they can free
IT to enable breakthrough performance gains with low-cost operating models that
deliver maximum return on investment.”
The study, which provides baseline information for the Unisys modernization
benchmark, surveyed 1,200 business and IT executives in organizations worldwide.
When asked to state their most important business objectives, the respondents to
the Unisys study uniformly placed priority on customer-focused and
customer-dependent goals, such as acquiring new customers, building closer
relationships with existing customers, developing new products and services,
growing sales and revenue and reaching new markets.
Those executive respondents identified 10 capabilities-nearly all dealing
with information and IT investments, which they believed were critical to
achieving those business objectives. The capabilities included ability to
support innovation, IT management practices, strategic decision-making, and
approach to IT investment, communications (information flow within and between
organizations), IT sourcing model and IT security model.
Each executive was asked to rate where their organization stands today in
capability to execute in each area and where they expect the organization to be
in the next three years. In each case executive ratings indicated a significant
gap between their current readiness and expected performance. For example:
- 62 percent of respondents expect that they will encourage innovation or be
market leaders at supporting it within three years. Yet 70 percent say that
currently they have no support for innovation, or their capability is only
evolving or moderate;
- In describing IT management practices, 52 percent of respondents expect to
treat IT as an investment or differentiator in three years, yet 72 percent
say that they currently treat it as a support function, a means to enhance
productivity or a capital expense;
- 67 percent of respondents expect to have integrated; collaborative
communications with critical stakeholders within three years, yet only 32
percent say they have such a capability now;
- While only 51 percent of respondents have a formal, mature IT sourcing
strategy and model today, 75 percent expects to have one in three years;
- 60 percent of respondents currently rate their security model as
non-existent, limited or moderate, yet 75 percent expect their security
model to be state-of-the-art in three years.
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