Gartner zu IT-Modernisierung: Zehn Signale frühzeitig erkennen

 Sign No.1: Skills Shortage. Many organisations are investing huge budgets in hiring programmers to keep an old system running. Instead, companies need a strategy for supporting the business that fully exploits, for as long as possible, the investment in the old system, but which also recognises that a replacement system strategy is also needed.

Sign No. 2: Vendor/Product Consolidation/Support.

As the number of vendors consolidates and products age, those products are retired by the acquiring company and taken off support status, with the result of increasing maintenance charges with little in the way of incremental functionality. However, companies often depend on these applications, and switching to a new application is both inconvenient and resource intensive. In some cases it requires resources that the IT group does not have and as a result, companies work harder to maintain more outdated but mission-critical applications.

Sign No. 3: Agility Metrics Decay.

Agility metrics for making a business changes decay as systems become more brittle and the "piling on effect" worsens. Consequently, the business cannot afford to change because the IT organisation can’t support the changes. The result is a loss of business agility in an increasingly agile world.

Sign No. 4: Operation Expenses Escalate

. Operation expenses become a larger portion of the IT budget as the piling on effect worsens. As a result there are little resources — money, people or time — to work on anything new.

Sign No. 5: Aging Technology Portfolio

. The aging technology portfolio drifts further away from the desired "future state" architecture standards. The technology vision laid out by the enterprise architects becomes impossible to achieve. The result is an increasingly outdated set of systems and infrastructure that becomes the source of more problems.

Sign No.6: Difficult to Access Information.

Information becomes increasingly difficult to access and analyse as data structures age. Modern business users are highly information-dependent. As the data becomes more out of date, less accurate and more difficult to access, the business is increasingly forced to work without the information needed to make decisions.

Sign No. 7: Legacy Capacity Risk.

Legacy capacity needs increase as new interfaces, such as Web connections, drive up transaction volumes, resulting in greater spending on traditional processing and storage and so forth. Ironically, this legacy capacity is usually priced at a premium compared with newer technologies riding the consumerisation curve.

Sign No. 8: Regulatory Compliance Issues/Risks Increase.

Compliance is an issue even in traditional lightly regulated industries, and legislation shows that any company may be at the mercy of outdated systems that can’t meet the needs of increased regulations.

Sign No. 9: IT Costs Increase, Agility Decreases.

Direct business purchasing of IT-related services drives up central IT costs and drives agility downward.

Sign No.10: Green IT.

Today’s chief information officers(CIOs) are likely to have targets that will involve substantial infrastructure changes to achieve green IT objectives. These changes will almost inevitably carry implications for the application portfolio.

To avoid the so called IT train wreck, Gartner advises that organisations put IT strategic planning, rather than tactical budgeting at the heart of the CIO management agenda.

“By developing an application strategy and focusing on retiring older systems, CIOs will be best placed to fund an IT modernisation programme that works to drive the IT organisation to achieve a desired state,” said Andy Kyte, vice president and Gartner Fellow.

Gartner analysts will provide more detailed analysis on IT modernisation at the upcoming Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008, taking place 3-7 November in Cannes, France. Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the IT industry's largest and most strategic conference, providing business leaders with a look at the future of IT. More than 3,000 senior business and IT strategists will gather for the insights, tools and solutions they need to ensure their IT initiatives are key contributors to and drivers of their enterprise’s success. Gartner's annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of attendees’ annual planning efforts. They rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organisations can use IT to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency. Additional information is available at www.gartner.com/eu/symposiumfall

Members of the media can register for the event by contacting Laurence Goasduff, Gartner PR on + 44 (0) 1784 267195 or at [email protected]

Additional information is available in the Gartner report “Signs Indicate a Train Wreck Is Coming, Unless You Modernize IT." The report is on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=748316&subref=simplesearch.

About Gartner

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. Gartner delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies, to business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises and professional services firms, to technology investors, Gartner is the indispensable partner to 60,000 clients in 10,000 distinct organizations. Through the resources of Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events, Gartner works with every client to research, analyze and interpret the business of IT within the context of their individual role. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A., and has 4,000 associates, including 1,200 research analysts and consultants in 80 countries. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.

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