techslog

What projects are on deck for many CIO’s for the remainder of 2007? Given that technology initiatives must respond to business needs, here is an idea from CIO Insight what their readers of say they're focusing on in 2007.
More than a third of those who took the top-projects survey say they are looking to do business process improvement. The next hottest areas, customer relationship management and business analytics, also require collaboration between information technologists and business people. Nowadays, businesses aren't funding anything whose return on investment they can't see, so expect to see the famous “ROI” in many meetings with the CIO.
"The projects we have scheduled for 2007 all answer a particular business need," says Gabrielle Wolfson, chief information officer of Spring Valley, N.Y.-based Par Pharmaceutical. "You're not going to implement technology for the sake of technology."
The unrelenting focus on ROI is leading companies to do more pilot projects and cut the number of risky big-bang initiatives they take on.
The ROI focus is also prompting companies to make better use of the systems they have in place. That's what the new push toward service-oriented architectures is all about. Indeed, while SOA itself doesn't appear on our list of the top 10 projects (it was the 12th-most-common project, cited by 12% of our readers), its principles of making better use of existing infrastructure and leveraging applications already in place are behind several of those that do, including Web services (No. 5 on our list) and enterprise systems planning (No. 9).

Project #1: Business Process Management/Improvement
PARTICIPANTS: Usually a joint effort of I.T. and a business unit. In a few isolated instances, BPM initiatives do not involve any technologists.
PRICE TAG: From $20,000 on the low end to tens of millions on the high end.
TIME LINE: A department-level pilot could be started and finished in five days. An enterprise wide project could take several years.

Project #2: Customer Relationship Management
PARTICIPANTS: Shared by technology and business units.
PRICE TAG: Streamlining a process might cost as little as $50,000. A global CRM rollout at a big company could cost $50 million.
TIME LINE: Payback usually comes in two to three years.

Project #3: Business Analytics/Business Intelligence
PARTICIPANTS: I.T. extracts the data; business analyzes it.
PRICE TAG: A big-company project could easily run into the millions.
TIME LINE: From a few days to a year or more.

Project #4: Desktop/Laptop Upgrades
PARTICIPANTS: I.T. sets the policies; business pays the freight.
PRICE TAG: Varies with configuration. The decline in PC prices is being mitigated somewhat by the arrival of Microsoft's new Vista operating system.
The shift toward laptop computers will continue this year; IDC says that more than two of every five new computers bought by companies will be laptops, up from one in three in 2005.

Project #5: Web Services
PARTICIPANTS: The CIO's A-team.
PRICE TAG: Whatever it costs to employ six crackerjack software designers for the length of the project.
TIME LINE: It's generally a year and a half before any sort of payback is realized. Break-even takes longer.

Project #6: Disaster Planning/Recovery
PARTICIPANTS: Senior business executives, up to and including the chief executive, usually have input. The board of directors often has oversight responsibility.

Project #7: Intrusion Detection and Prevention
PARTICIPANTS: Managers from both the security and network teams.
PRICE TAG: Hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
TIME LINE: Ongoing.

Project #8: Server Upgrades
PARTICIPANTS: A routine task handled by the technology department.

Project #9: Enterprise Systems Planning
PARTICIPANTS: The technical executives with the broadest view of a company's systems. Often, they'll get some assistance from the chief financial officer.
PRICE TAG: High in terms of management time

Project #10: Financial reporting
PARTICIPANTS: The place where the CIO's world intersects most closely with the CFO's.
PRICE TAG: Most companies now spend about 5% of their I.T. budget on compliance.

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