How CIOs make technology investments

Some of the decision criteria mentioned in this article suprised me. Do they surprise you?

T. Ravichandran, an associate professor at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute's Lally School of Management and Technology, has been studying what influences IT technology investment as a process in depth, along with teaching courses in IT value creation, IT strategy, and supply chain management. In fact, his latest paper, published by the Journal of Information Technology and Management, is called "A Comprehensive Investigation on the Relationship Between Information Technology Investments and Firm Diversification."

The BTM Institute recently sat down with Professor T. Ravhichandran of Rensselear Polytechnic Institute's Lally School of Management and Technology to discuss his research findings about the influencers that drive technology investment decisions, the way organizations monitor investments, and the role innovation plays in the investment mix. Here's what he had to say:

Baseline article

Data center managers becoming superstars?

I love this story. Rarely do the technical experts of our world get a chance in the limelight.

Long relegated to the dungeons of the IT world, hidden in dark rooms and tinkering with facility equipment, the data center facility manager is now becoming more wanted, and harder-to-find.

As the New York Times puts in its article, data center facility managers were often thought of as “blue-collar workers in the high-tech world.” Really, though, that hasn’t changed much. There is much of that blue-collar attitude among data center facility managers that often comes from their penchant for tinkering. That’s why many of them became engineers in the first place, because they like tinkering.

Techtarget article

Cloud Computing: What the heck do you mean?

Here's a great explanation from Forrester Research on Cloud Computing, the different classes of services that are now being offered, and what's being relabeled as Cloud Computing, also known as being "cloudwashed."

The Cloud, As Seen in 2002

Is cloud computing a new way of computing? Or a new buzzword for an elderly concept? Mashable takes the latter position, asserting that cloud computing is an old idea with a new coat of paint.

Here’s a relevant tidbit from the Wayback Machine: In March 2002 I covered the IMN Forum on Carrier Hotels and Internet Data Centers in New York. One of the panels focused on outsourcing, and where it might be headed. Here’s an excerpt:

Data Center Knowledge article

Business impact analysis for SMBs

Conducting a business impact analysis (BIA) is often viewed as an exercise that is exclusive to enterprise-class organizations with seemingly limitless funds for consulting services. Large consulting firms often spend months mapping every business process and interviewing numerous business unit representatives to come up with sophisticated financial loss projection charts.

These projects are time-consuming and costly because of the complexity of large companies, which rely on dozens of core functions and sometimes hundreds of support functions. Take for example an airline that has a reservation system, check-in, baggage handling, refueling, maintenance, in-flight catering, customer service, marketing and the multitude of secondary functions that support the core business activity. Now try to imagine the impact of the interruption of one or many of these functions on the organization as whole; what are the immediate financial losses, cumulative losses and long-term effects?

Search Disaster Recovery article

Cummins Hikes Prices on Diesel Generators

The price of diesel generators from Cummins Power Generation (CMI) is going up. Cummins said today that it will raise prices by 2 to 7 percent on commercial generator set products between 15 kW and 2700 kW as of Jan. 1, 2009. The company cited “rising commodity and fuel prices as well as the consequence of the current industry dynamics.”

Data Center Knowledge article

Pricing, power and cooling in the data center

A consulting firm we work with recently brought 4 CIOs in to talk about the issues that they were facing with regards to external data centers.

There were two overriding issues that ALL FOUR CIOs expressed:

They never knew from month to month what the billing would be. Pricing was convoluted, confusing and variable.

All four were running up against power and cooling constraints in their existing data centers. Either they were promised densities that could not be delivered, or the facility was out of power and unwilling or unable to add more.

Moral: be wary if your provider's pricing is confusing. Get firm commitments on power densities and make sure you have alternative strategies in place with regards to power and cooling.

Here's Gartner's recent take on the power and cooling issues we face today.

STAMFORD, Conn., October 2, 2007 — By 2011, more than 70 percent of U.S. enterprise data centers will face tangible disruptions related to energy consumption, floor space, and/or costs, according to Gartner, Inc. In fact, during the next five years, most U.S. enterprise data centers will spend as much on energy (power and cooling) as they will on hardware infrastructure.

“CIOs of large U.S. organizations must prepare for a period of rapid changes in their data centers,” said Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner. “This disruption will be accompanied by a significant increase in capital and operational expenditures. Failure to respond quickly and appropriately to the changing market conditions and technologies will result in needlessly high energy bills, expensive service contracts and delays in implementing new technologies.”

Gartner article

RFID in the Data Center

Bank of America said last week that it is using radio frequency identification chips (RFID) to keep track of servers and other IT equipment, and is working to advance a standard for RFID tracking in financial data centers. The huge bank, which just got even bigger with its acquisition of Merrill Lynch, has deployed RFID in 14 of its 28 data centers, the company told RFID Journal (link via Zero Downtime).

RFID allows information to be stored and retrieved on small devices called RFID tags, The technology is used in enterprise supply chain management, allowing companies to keep track of the location and status of products and orders. RFID has obvious utility in data center consolidations and migrations and in managing server sprawl in large organizations.

Data Center Knowledge article

The Next Huge Security Threat: Web Applications

Software as a service may be on the rise, but so are security threats targeted at loopholes in application code. Here are some application security strategies from industry experts, with a closer look at one area not generally associated with security and information technology management--insurance.

As companies flock to software-as-a-service (SaaS) and design their own Web-based applications to take advantage of an always-on and always-accessible enterprise, they're also opening themselves to a formidable security threat, many experts believe.

Baseline article