News & Events

December 7, 2011

Given the rapid pace of technological change, what can CIOs and IT Managers expect from 2012? What issues will they carry over from 2011, and how will IT solve these issues? Are there new challenges to be wary of?

 

These questions and more were recently asked of Michael Chanter, General Manager, Professional Services, Frontline. His candid responses shed light on the imminent future of IT for enterprise and SME businesses in Australia.

Legacy issues from 2011

Firstly, where are CIOs and IT Managers at now? What are the legacy challenges that they will carry into 2012?

According to Michael, there are two key issues. The first is the lingering expectation that CIOs should squeeze the most life out of IT assets before upgrading.

“We have a lot of customers who are revisiting their data centres and questioning this philosophy of pushing existing assets to their limit. As the cost of power skyrockets and new, greener technologies are much more economical to run, the financial value of this dated practice is really being challenged,” said Michael.

The second issue is around applications. “IT exists to support business applications. From a CIO’s perspective, their role is to keep line-of-business applications alive while the underlying infrastructure evolves – for example, to a cloud or virtualised environment,” he said.

The ongoing challenge is to ensure that these business-critical applications are both supported and upgraded in a timely and economic fashion.

Looking to 2012

On top of these ongoing matters, what are the major issues facing CIOs as 2012 approaches?

“There are four key issues that will come to the fore in 2012: the consumerisation of IT, the changing IT workforce, green IT, and the cloud,” said Michael.

1. Consumerisation of IT

Consumer technology is moving faster than corporate technology. Increasingly, employees – right up to C-level executives – are bringing their own devices into the workplace, and expect to be able to use them. This “BYO device” phenomenon will drive more IT change in the next 10 years than any other trend.

Then there is the penetration of services like Amazon, Facebook and other social environments, which also have a significant impact on the corporate IT environment.

The rapid advance of cloud-based consumer applications is challenging the enterprise’s mandated standard operating environment (SOE), and CIOs and IT managers must consider how best to manage their impact on critical IT issues like security.

2. Changing IT workforce

Closely related to the consumerisation of IT is the encroachment of Generation Y into the workforce. This presents a cultural shift, as these very IT-savvy workers expect that things will happen quickly.

“Tell a Gen Y worker that they have to use the Intranet, not Drop Box – or internal email instead of G-mail – and they won’t be impressed. These workers are used to pulling disparate pieces of technology together to use in a mobile fashion, from anywhere, and expect the same of their workplace,” said Michael.

For CIOs, who are used to keeping everything in the firewall and being the arbiter of all things technology-related, this presents a whole new set of challenges to overcome – and a significant shift in mindset.

3. Greening IT

Power consumption in the data centre is becoming a real issue for CIOs, and the design of infrastructure is increasingly shaped by this concern.

“When you look at the density of environments in the data centre, in our experience we have massive power cores – up to 35 kW for a rack of infrastructure that has to be powered 24/7. That’s roughly 6 or 7 times the amount of power we were seeing 3 or 4 years ago,” said Michael.

4. The cloud

The perception of the cloud is changing rapidly. Just 18 months ago, security was cited as the primary concern by CIOs – now, security is not nearly so much of an issue, and cloud has become a top business priority.

As the cloud becomes more ubiquitous, CIOs have to consider strategies for taking their existing environment and virtualising it, as well as moving applications and data into a public or hybrid cloud. They also need to formulate a holistic plan for this move – most enterprises are on the path to cloud computing via virtualisation, but lack the end strategy to complete the journey.

“It’s certainly worth investing in, as cloud computing presents a great opportunity for businesses to access new services and gain business advantage,” Michael said.

Budgets: doing more with the same

Michael predicts that IT budgets will remain the same in 2012. “As always, CIOs will be asked to do more with less. So they need to be agile, economic and responsive.”

With most serious IT environments always going through an upgrade, it is important to plan beyond 2012 and ask whether the systems and infrastructure being implemented will increase the agility of your environment.

This is particularly true for enterprise environments, which typically have significant capital investment in their IT infrastructure, and are locked in to line-of-business applications. Faced with these constraints, CIOs must think of ways to be more like SMEs – who have more agility than ever before thanks to cloud services and other technologies.

Gazing into the crystal ball

“There’s a lot to contemplate as the IT landscape changes. More than anything, I think convergence is going to have an impact on business. The catalysts for convergence and ongoing innovation – such as NBN Co, mobile penetration and technological advances in mobile broadband – are here and happening now. It’s not something that you can ignore,” said Michael.

“With this convergence and the change it will bring, it is important to have a plan in place and the flexibility to deal with unexpected issues – but also to take advantage of opportunities as they come along.”

Learn more

Listen to key take-outs from Michael Chanter’s interview
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