BUSINESS INSIGHTS
December 2004
Contacts:
Clive Longbottom
Quocirca Ltd
Tel +44 118 948 3360
Clive.longbottom@quocirca.com
Change and Flexibility
Bringing IT and the Business Together
Change happens.
Executive Overview
A simple statement that encompasses the major problems for today’s businesses.
Windows of opportunity that would have lasted for months in the 1980s are now
measured in weeks. Hi-tech and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies are
often dealing with campaigns where the window of opportunity is measured in days –
and some retailers are looking at a matter of hours. We are facing increasing
pressures – and we have to change rapidly to meet these pressures. Yet the
technology that we have been putting in place over the last 30 years has grown to a
level of complexity where just managing it is taking nearly four fifths of an IT
department’s budget, and any change is seen as a major risk to the capabilities of the
company. Changes that could have been risked 20 years ago as having little impact on
a business are now too dangerous to contemplate without weeks or months of
regression testing and planning. We have a dichotomy – the speed of business change
is increasing – just when the capability to implement changes in technology has
slowed.
Headlines break every day with stories of Company A giving out a profits warning due
to problems with a new ERP system, or Company B having to spend more money than
it expected to get the expected returns from its CRM system. It seems that technology
is now more of a brake to many companies than the accelerator that was expected.
In many cases, the issue comes down to a lack of knowledge of the IT environment,
and a lack of capability to manage change across this environment. Poor knowledge of
assets and their interdependencies combined with poor policies leads to a lack of
visibility of the impact a change at the technology l