Business Service Management Hub

Companies looking for an edge, might want to begin to explore supply chain analytics, a growing space that gives your company insight into activities within supply chain, valuable information that could give you a leg up in the market.

Wall Street wants to monitor social media streams to find trends they think will help predict the market. I’m skeptical about such an approach, but I do believe it can help marketers find information about their companies from a much smaller sub-set of data.

When the likes of the US government and Microsoft are committing fully to the Cloud, it has to make you stand up and take notice, and while you can’t make your decisions based on what others are doing, you have to at least be thinking about it.

For several years, analyst told us that you must have Discovery in order to do a CMDB project. Sure… I’ll buy that concept, but it doesn’t mean I have to start with it…

This is a topic I lean a little less toward IT driving than I do marketing as a technology to reach customers and prospects. Most social media tools are external to an organization and not really something I believe IT should own and more the realm of the marketeers to use to reach out to their customers and prospects.

Another nice piece from Forrester regarding business transformation and the roles of CIOs due to the ability for the business to buy their own technology. The real message is that the budget is being controlled by the business and less by the IT organization forcing IT to better communicate the value of underlying technologies and how they will help in growing the business. The focus has to always be on the business even when it is internally focused projects.

This is a nice post from Marc of Forrester. He outlines well the things that need to be considered as contracting with service providers and purchasing technology moves around an organization as part of a business transformation (BT) initiative.

What does this continue to tell IT organizations? Two things, the cloud is here to stay and business is seeking outside alternatives. If technology and management spending were up, I’d have an aha moment, IT is getting it and turning that corner of transformation and change to leverage technology to grow the business and is harnessing the power of agile computing.

I tend to agree with James and have written often on the same subject. Those leading their industry this year, likely won’t be the ones leading next year. The question is are you trying to merely drive down costs or fuel growth? Even with the Amazon blip of a week or so ago, those fueling growth are unwaivered in their approach.

I agree that costs need to be managed, however, there comes a point of no return. Justifying the business value and return on investment is the shift IT organizations need to make in order to be competitive with the cloud and SaaS providers.

No discussion of analytics is complete without discussing Google Analytics, the free analytics tool from Google. It can provide your company with a wealth of valuable data about your web site’s visitors. You simply add some code to your web site, and Google begins analyzing the traffic for you.