"IT Is An Investment, Not A Cost Centre"

Recently completed research from Unisys Corporation involving 1,200 organisations worldwide, shows significant gaps between executives’ business and IT goals and their estimation of their organisations’ ability to achieve those objectives. Those gaps indicate that executives are not getting the most from their business initiatives and information technology (IT) investments, and need new approaches to modernise their business processes, strategic applications and IT infrastructures to address their core business challenges.

The company announced the Unisys Modernisation Benchmark service to help executives close the critical gaps mentioned above. Using trend information from Unisys research, this service helps organisations 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, vice president, 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 centre, not an investment. The Unisys Modernisation 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.”

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Fissures between Aspiration and Execution

The double-blind Unisys study, which provides baseline information for the Unisys Modernisation Benchmark, surveyed 1,200 business and IT executives in organisations 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 organisations), IT sourcing model and IT security model.

The Unisys Modernisation Benchmark service helps clients measure the organisation’s capabilities in six dimensions including business resilience, collaborative business, IT as a business enabler, open business and IT, green business and business execution.

By comparing the organisation’s capabilities and modernisation progress in these critical areas to those of peers and competitors, as well as to industry and market averages, executives can re-evaluate the direction of their business and create a framework for where and how operations must evolve to take the organisation where it needs to go.