Surviving with smart IT strategies

Anne Ozzimo

According to a recent survey by the US-based Chief Information Officers' Executive Board, more than 60 per cent of chief information officers are cutting back on short-term technology spending and postponing long-term plans.

IT budgets in the United States are predicted to grow by only 2.3 per cent in 2009, instead of the 5.8-per-cent growth originally forecast.

The economic crisis provides an opportunity for organisations to create leaner, more efficient operations, because circumstances demand that companies transform themselves to survive tough times. Oracle took this approach during the last downturn, consolidating and simplifying its IT infrastructure and standardising business processes worldwide. As a result, Oracle created a stronger platform to support future acquisitions and organic growth and doubled its operating margins in the process.

US-based energy company Exelon understands the importance of investing in IT during a downturn. Last year, it kicked off a project to deploy an integrated Oracle platform to eliminate fragmented and manual planning and reporting processes and better manage its investments in tackling climate change. Despite the volatility of natural gas prices and the credit crunch in the US, the company remains committed to the project due to its strategic importance. 

"We can't afford to stop investing in initiatives like our finance transformation programme. It will help us navigate through volatile business cycles, make prudent investments in our operations, and return value to investors," explains Exelon senior vice president and chief information officer Daniel Hill.

Rather than slashing IT programmes across the board, chief information officers should consider reducing complexity to take costs out of the business, and focusing on innovative IT projects that deliver a fast return on investment.

The key is to lay out a multiyear IT roadmap with both goals in mind, then identify areas where you can make progress very quickly, maybe in six or nine months.

Oracle's senior vice president of applications development Ed Abbo says many IT departments have cut costs by reducing the number of applications across the business. Oracle Application Integration Architecture, a common object framework that lets companies create processes unique to their business, is designed to attack the kind of IT complexity that is plaguing most customers today.

Anne Ozzimo is Oracle's senior director of applications product marketing. This is part one of a two-part series.