Upgrade or Migrate?

As technology advances more quickly than IT budgets grow, some executives may see themselves faced with an important decision: whether to spend IT dollars to upgrade systems that may become obsolete, or to invest heavily in CRM technologies based on new systems that may or may not take precedence. According to the Yankee Group report, Align IT with Business Process to Optimize Performance and Management, enterprise IT infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex, and reliance on network, computing platforms, and applications technology continues to escalate. New technologies like Web services continue to add complexity and cost to IT operations. At the same time enterprises are forcing their IT organizations to reduce operational expenses, they also expect IT to help the company deal with competitive pressures by developing an infrastructure capable of delivering new applications to fuel new business initiatives. "Despite the downturn in the economy and lower IT budgets, the pace of technology has not slowed," Zeus Kerravala, Yankee Group Enterprise Infrastructure vice president, said in a company statement. "Companies soon must decide whether to upgrade existing applications and infrastructure or invest in new technologies such as unified communications, Web services, and utility computing, and determine how to leverage them for maximum gain." "To truly achieve maximum benefit from new and existing technology, CIOs and IT executives must shift their thinking from bits and bytes to productivity and profits," Kerravala said. "This shift in the industry is imperative to IT's evolution within the enterprise as it becomes truly strategic to the business." The Yankee Group cautions that CIOs and IT executives who have not begun to align their IT infrastructure with business processes and requirements soon will be at a competitive disadvantage.