Navigating Technology choices
The most crucial step in the process of assessing the value of an IT infrastructure to the overall business is to understand the business requirements and to map technology investment to them. Is a company looking to expand into a new market? Or diversify into a new product or industry sector? Does it need to streamline its manufacturing capabilities? Whatever the requirements, the budget available will have to suffice.

With a bewildering choice of technology on offer and several potential expenditure options for an organisation’s limited IT budget, this initial definition of requirements is the most important step in ensuring future success in meeting short term return on investment goals and long term business goals of competitive advantage, reduced IT complexity, etc.

There are three key steps to get on the right path to success in maximising IT spend and which make the most of the IT infrastructure already in place:

Step 1 : Consolidate your information
Many businesses operate a disparate array of databases, file or email systems, each needing management and administration. In this scenario, most companies don’t actually know what information they have, as their most valuable assets sit in isolated departmental pools of data. Unstructured data is not productive and adds little value to a company’s bottom line.

IT management teams should consider consolidating all of the company’s data into one single database. Think about it. The name of a customer only ever entered once, regardless of the application being used. An employee’s details entered once for human resources, payroll and project management purposes. By moving to a single database model, information is centralised – which maximises availability and performance, reduces administration and ultimately makes life easier for customers and employees. Everyone in the company can have selective and secure access to the same, accurate data. This model offers visibility across the company to deliver an accurate and real-time 360º view of key business areas including financial, HR, customer and supplier information.

With today’s affordable database technology, this option is entirely feasible for almost any size of business and can save an impressive amount of IT budget that can then be used to grow capabilities through the next steps on the technology growth path.

Step 2 : Exploit your existing hardware to the fullest
Hardware costs traditionally form a largest part of precious IT budgets, and typically individual servers are poorly used. A recent survey of large companies by Morgan Stanley found that 67% of servers are utilised to less than 60% capacity – a shocking waste of IT dollars. Clustering technologies available today obviate the necessity for large expensive servers, and ensure hardware capacity is used to the full.

Real Application Clusters (RAC) is basically a group of low cost machines bound together to run large enterprise applications. This solution to hardware waste has gained momentum as a fault-tolerant, high-performance, scalable technology choice and is also proving to be a viable low-cost alternative to mainframe infrastructures.

Hutchison-Priceline in Asia is an excellent example of a company successfully using RAC technology. Hutchison-Priceline works with one of the travel industry’s largest collections of travel operators, including 25 airlines and 8,000 hotels worldwide, processing high volumes of transactions on a 24/7 basis. It is using Oracle9i RAC for all of its Asia travel service transactions, not only for proven scalability, but also to help achieve substantial cost-savings.

With less money spent on hardware, IT managers can look to spend their IT dollars on strategic projects for future needs.