THE ‘IT’ PARADIGM

Ancient Rome, it is said, grew to a position of strength and glory largely
because of its well planned and executed roadways that allowed the free movement
of commerce and also the rapid deployment of its armies. Roads that were a
generation ahead of their times and would have appeared foolhardy at inception.
Fast forward from ancient Rome to the current business landscape and, disparate
as it may appear at first look, the similarities are striking.

Consider some of the major business paradigms that have occurred in the past
two decades. Corporations now work with customers and vendors who are
geographically farther from them than ever before, customers increasingly demand
rapid response and flexibility from their vendors and the rate of change in a
given time period is higher than ever before.

This scenario demands corporations to work from geographically dispersed
locations yet retain the ability to ‘sense and react’ to changing business
stimuli by instantaneously sharing information across all locations. In this
scenario the network–LAN or WAN–becomes all-important for a company and,
like the Roman roads, provides the media which enables rapid deployment of
information and instructions.

Managing this crucial resource is the key to achieving the desired efficiency
leverage as well as the related fiscal returns. There are some salient
imperatives that a CIO needs to focus on as he juggles the conflicting demands
of high reliability and performance and the limitations of the IT budget.

The first imperative would be to list the deliverables that the network is to
deliver–preferably in measurable terms. Size, scalability, security level,
latency, reliability, failovers and the like. These would then form the
foundation for all future estimations of performance and expected returns. At
this stage a rough budget helps to fine tune the deliverables such that it makes
sound ‘economic’ sense. It is an iterative process where budgets and
deliverables need to be in consonance.

The second is to select a technology solution that may not necessarily be
best in class and popularity, but optimally sized for the specific application
in mind.

The third is to recognize that the network consists not just of hardware and
software but the all-important, peopleware. CIOs need to be empathetic towards
the user community, especially when it comes to unleashing a new IT solution or
technology on them. An awareness building and training period needs to precede
the launch to ensure its acceptance and the eventual success of the deployment.

The HR function can also add considerable value in managing this in a
well-planned and coordinated manner.

The fourth is monitoring mechanisms that will periodically check the
operational parameters that the Network is to deliver; uptime, latency etc, and
raise an alarm whenever these dip.

Given that organizations grow over a period of time, the scalability of the
network is vital. A typical approach could be to add bandwidth; a fairly
painless solution given the falling rates / bandwidth. Alternately, one could
consider deploying some of the excellent network management tools available
toady that would allow one to make the existing bandwidth more productive by
spreading the usage over different time spans, allowing priority to mission
critical applications, allowing dynamic bandwidth allocations to different user
groups, blocking out undesired sites and choking access to delinquent users.

CIOs need to constantly monitor and revisit their Network to ensure that it
continues to deliver on return on investment.

The numbers-driven ‘return-on-investment’ approach that seeks to quantify
every deliverable into money terms is not an easy task and inexact at times,
given the nature of the deliverables and the difficulty in relating them to
business output in an integral manner.

Or at times, the ‘rely-on-instinct’ approach that banks on equal measures
of sound business sense and common sense; to take that leap of faith when pure
numbers do not tell the whole story.

Like the Romans did. Sanjay Handu The author is CIO and head (commercial) at
Tyco Electronics