The IT budget is constantly under review. Business managers are asking quite openly why enterprise IT is so expensive. And if IT is spending so much money, why can it not react quicker to the demands for new projects? The answer is quite simple: IT is so expensive because it has so many ‘legacy systems’ to take care of. And who is to blame for these legacy systems? Well, we all are…. Bad mistakes made in the past, partly by the business, partly by IT.

Resources for new projects

IT is often asked to be as agile as possible : Marketing or Sales spots an opportunity in the market and IT is requested to build a new system that will help address this opportunity. But as we all know, not all business opportunities turn into successful projects. Sometimes, a brand-new project is started and supported by IT, that ultimately fails. The only trouble is : some of these applications need to be kept alive for a long, long time, eating up valuable resources and budget. Resources and budget that had better be spent on new projects, for new opportunities.

Turn bad IT into good IT

When the financial crisis erupted, a number of banks or parts of banks were quarantined : all the toxic investments were put together into a ‘bad bank’ that was created as an independent entity so it could not damage the rest of the bank and the bank system. Wouldn’t it be a good idea if the IT department could do exactly the same with the ‘toxic investments’ that it was forced to make in the past? Let IT simply transfer these bad investments into a ‘Bad IT department’ so that ‘good-IT’ and its budget are only judged against decisions that the CIO has made himself.

En photo : Arnaud Bacros, Country Manager EMC Belux

Read his blog, or follow Arnaud on : @ArnaudBacros