The business and IT landscapes are shifting rapidly. The boundaries between them are becoming blurred, almost to the point of overlapping.

These fundamental changes have created a new terrain that can be regarded either as a challenge or as an opportunity, depending on one’s ability to execute.

In order to adapt, IT professionals have to be empowered to increase their responsiveness in a highly complex technological and business environment, and deliver within the financial constraints without reducing their quality of service. The cloud has emerged and burst through the IT boundary as the new major enabler of the IT industry, and it’s expected to have a profound and durable effect on the economics of business.

The cloud is pushing software vendors to transform their revenue models from expensive software package licenses to commoditized subscription-based services. Lean-IT initiatives are eliminating bureaucratic management practices and recently we’ve been hearing IBM talk about the idea of expert systems.

The current economic climate pushes the need to deliver more business value from IT. On one side, CIOs and CTOs feel increased pressure to perform and are measured according to new indicators like revenue generation, business acceleration and time-to-value. On the other side, CMOs and CSOs require measurable, high quality information delivered ‘anytime, anyplace’.

Successful business software solutions will be the ones that can distill science, package business expertise, and offer intelligently processed, actionable information to businesspeople. Packaging of business expertise will be increasingly important as problems become even more complex.

All the ingredients are there to match software offerings to the needs of the globally interconnected economy. IT teams need strong allies, and providers of business software solutions can bridge the ever-shortening gap between IT and business value.

Share/Bookmark