CIO Key Challenges

A recent job specification for Head of IT for a retailer in Cape Town listed the following:
Key Challenges:
• Balance scarce resources and budget with conflicting demands.
• Ensure systems stability and availability.
• Development, recruitment and retention of key skills.

The development in IT and Business Process Integration and Automation, as confirmed by Gartner and Forrester, will go a long way to meeting the first two of these key challenges. It has been our experience that companies have significantly benefited from the use of technology to Integrate, Automate and Orchestrate both Business Processes and IT System Administration with measurable benefits.

Examples of areas that companies have benefitted significantly include:
- Service level commitments to on-boarding and off-boarding of users
- Reduction of MTTR of IT systems problem by up to 95%
- Business process improvements reducing new investment approvals from 2 weeks to under 4 hours
- Dismantling of a complete call centre due to accurate automated processing of B2B transactions
- Automation of “overtime impacted tasks” with huge reductions in overtime expenses
- Freeing up of operational staff to dealing with higher value work and also from dealing with Cause rather than Symptom
- Staff are also freed up to be able to tackle more strategic objectives
- A large international retailer has been able to increase POS device availability from low 90%s to 99.999% in approx 6 months
- Many others ……