IT optimization is a big thing these days Coach Factory Outlet Online, part of the getting more bang for the buck custom oakley sunglasses, working smarter, and doing more with less management mentality. Nobody quibbles with the need to get the most you can out of your IT investment. The question is how.
Mission optimization: Start before you even get to technology by answering the question of what exactly IT should be doing for finance and the business at large. If the answer is just to run the financial systems and make sure that they are backed up and available, you are way underoptimized. If that’s all you want, just outsource IT. Instead custom oakley sunglasses, IT should be helping finance to collaborate with the rest of the business, partners, and customers. It also should be leveraging data, systems, and networks to help the business attract customers and generate more revenue.
The above are all fine, but the financial organization’s concern with IT optimization needs to have a different focus. That’s why wiredFINANCE offers the following five-part guide to IT Optimization for Finance.
Here are the five areas of IT Optimization for Finance:
The IT vendors have jumped on the IT optimization bandwagon in a big way. IBM simply calls it IT optimization and focuses on IT efficiency. HP calls it cost optimization and focuses on IT costs, including visibility into IT financials. For others, IT optimization means the virtualized data center.
Platform/vendor optimization: This calls for vendor and platform rationalization. It is costly to support multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, UNIX, SaaS) and to manage multiple vendor relationships Coach Factory Outlet Online, including SaaS relationships. One vendor and one platform are unrealistic, but more than a few become a financial drain.
GRC optimization: The concerns here are twofold — whether IT is effectively and appropriately practicing GRC itself and whether IT is efficiently and effectively supporting finance’s central role in GRC. The key is to define governance policies in a way that IT systems can automate, monitor, and enforce them. When optimized, GRC becomes a set of routine, automated business processes and stops becoming a costly burden.
Security optimization: This goes beyond simply trying to stop bad guys from hacking your systems. It goes hand-in-hand with GRC optimization to address such things as data protection and privacy. Do you handle credit card transactions and credit card data? Then security optimization must encompass PCI and similar security standards. Do you handle health and medical data? Then there is HIPAA to contend with. Security optimization needs to look broadly and start early. It must be built into everything that IT does from the outset.
Application optimization: Are you running the best mix of applications for the business? Core financial and administration systems are commodities that can be outsourced. Instead custom oakley sunglasses, focus on applications like business intelligence, business analytics, business performance management, and collaboration. This is where you can get the maximum bang from IT and your data.
There are automated tools and best practices to help address all of these areas, but IT optimization approached in this way needn’t be expensive. If done correctly, it actually can lower costs through platform and application optimization while potentially generating new revenue through a redefined, optimized IT mission. ###
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