The Role of Information Technology in Today’s Economy

There seems to be a steady stream of books published on the role of Information Technology within the business it supports. The role of IT is constantly evolving and has changed significantly from the days when the IT organization was often referred to as “data processing.” Today, in many industries, IT enables some businesses to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Those companies that leverage IT for competitive advantage often differ from their competitors in two ways with respect to their IT organizations: they view IT as a strategic business enabler instead of as a cost center, and they work to maximize the efficiency of their IT operations so that they can focus their resources on providing value to the business and respond to today’s environment of rapidly changing business conditions. Microsoft has developed a model, the Infrastructure Optimization model , and an initiative, the Dynamic Systems Initiative , to assist IT organizations in becoming efficient business enablers for their companies. If you aren’t familiar with the IO model or DSI, we highly recommend you follow the above links and familiarize yourself with the information and resources provided within these two programs. In Bruce’s January 26, 2009 post , he touched upon IT being a business enabler. Bruce also discussed what we see as the four cornerstones that drive IT behavior: Cost Agility Quality of Service And Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC). We recently published the results of a study we did on the IT labor costs of providing core infrastructure workloads. You can learn more about our study by visiting the Spotlight on Cost content on Microsoft.com, where you can register to download a whitepaper of our findings. One surprising discovery in our research was how few companies implement best practices to improve IT efficiency . Of 51 best practices studied across six different workloads (networking, identity and access, data management, print sharing, email and collaboration), the average adoption rate was only 30% – meaning, each of the best practices was implemented on average only 30% of the time. We also found that roughly 70-75% of the companies were operating at the basic maturity level, per the Core IO model. The basic maturity level is the lowest and least optimized level per the model, so this is a very high percentage of companies