Are you silently adhering to the old-fashioned IT models to keep your enterprise running in the short term, or are you innovating your IT environment to help your enterprise in the long term.

In the Jan/Feb 2009 From the Inside, I talked about "innovate or die", and in the Mar/Apr 2009, I talked about how much the economy sucks and the opportunities that exist.

Recessions have a way of pushing for innovations within business and business practices. The old-fashioned, tried and true, models and methods aren't working as well now, so companies are starting to look for new ways to draw in customers and decrease expenses.

Businesses continue to struggle over getting the mid-market customer that had sustained them for the last several years. The CEO and CFO, as well as sales departments, are starting to look at the value market and the premium markets. Data, reporting, and accessibility to this information is key to finding these markets that the company had previously treated as the forgotten step child.

It may take some innovation to produce the data, or to provide the information needed to combine geographic location, sales data, and customer profiles.

If your CEO asked you how you can provide accessible data like this, or provide some other innovation, what type of idea will you deliver? Are you able to provide high-speed experiments, or will you have to tell your CEO it will take 18-24 months before you could do anything?

Do you know how to fully use all the tools you already have? Do you know what tools exist that would solve your problems or make your job easier? Are you able to tap data from outside your enterprise to enhance the presentation, add accuracy, and provide more data? Are you able to provide outside systems easy access to the data you have accumulated over the last 30 years?

Web services, APIs, graphical reports, data accessibility tools, and mining and warehousing tools are important now, but what will your business ask of you next? Can you connect to Facebook, Twitter, or Windows Live and Sharepoint? Can Salesforce.com access your customer data information? What automation do you have within your systems? What automation is missing? If you can't answer these questions, the International Spectrum 2010 conference is coming up April 12-15, 2010. You can get them answered there, as well as get the tools that will facilitate the innovation your CEO is going to require of you.

If you can't wait until then, take look at the webinars available, or talk with someone at your local user group or a consultant. There is a lot more you can do for your business's ROI than you may think.

I did a session this year at International Spectrum 2009 Conference called "Alphabet Soup".  I talked about current IT terms and what they mean to us, and how they effect us in our day to day life.

One of the terms I covered was "Green" and "Green IT".  After the session was done, a few people said I should write more about it and what it means to us.  So here I am.

The question of what "Green" is in IT is very relative.  "Green" started out as a term for "cutting your carbon footprint".  The problem is that there are many different ways to do this.  Let me start out with a case and point from a recent issue of an IT Magazine I read.  They did an article on creating a "Green" computer.  The researchers put a computer together that used as many components that where manufactured out of recycled components as possible.  Then did stress tests on the computer and did an evaluation and article on that computer.

The next issue they included an additional article/retraction because they got slammed by readers whose concepts of "Green" differed from the researchers.  The ideas of what "Green" computing is ranged from lower power consumption, which of course leads to a lower "carbon footprint" at the power plants, to recycled parts, to using laptops and think clients instead of desktops.  Other explained that they didn't think this computer was really "Green" because it required more energy to create the components made from recycle components due to the extraction and then manufacture process.

They are only a few examples, and as you can see, the term "Green" is a bit relative.  If you focus on the concept of "lower Carbon footprint" and assume that means lower power consumption, then any computer system that uses less power than another would say that is green.

I've talked with some CIOs and their concept of going green is removing 1 computer from there data center and making sure that everyone turns off their computer at night.

Another replaced most of their thick client PCs with thin clients, and moved all the processing to a central server in the computer room.  While this cuts down on the amount of power used on each PC, it increases the amount of power in the computer room, but in computer and in cooling and conditioning.  But since this is lowering the amount of power used by whole company, then its termed going "Green".

You can really go pretty far with this concept.  By using Linux computers instead of Windows computer (which usually requires more processing power), you would be going "Green" because you don't need such a large computer and don't need the same power consumption.
“Green” has become a marketing buzzword lately.  So if you are asked, "Is your MultiValue database server Green" you can say "Yes".

We don't require the same hardware resources as other applications and databases.  You save on power consumption.  You don’t need the large storage arrays, or the complex multiprocessor systems.

Innovate or your application will die a slow death. Harsh words, but you’ll start seeing more and more CIOs, CTOs, and even CEOs demanding more and more from their existing systems and business applications.

Most companies rely on their business software and systems more than they rely on their employees. As companies start cutting back on costs, they will look at the IT department, and see 80% of their IT budget applied to maintenance of existing systems, with the remaining 20% on new innovations or R&D.

This is the 80/20 rule or paradigm. While this is valid, it is also a trap that many IT departments fall into. When times get tough, they start focusing more of their budgets into the maintenance role and forsake innovation. While this works well for the short term, many times it becomes the long term plan as well, causing company’s business systems to fall farther and farther behind the requirements of the business.

With the way things are in the economy, I expect to see many companies will start looking at the IT budget, but I don’t expect them to do the wholesale cutting they did during the dot-com bust. During the dot-com bust, many companies started to cut IT budgets, but quickly found that they could not do it without adversely impacting the productivity of the rest of their business.

Instead, the companies that invested in their IT departments, and specifically in new software tools and innovation, found that they could run their companies with less people and more software. While this concept only goes so far, many existing business applications severely lack the innovations in key areas due to the focus on the 80/20 paradigm.

Some of this is due to lack of planning, bean counting, and even lack of knowledge that something can or cannot be done within their business systems.

Another reason is the “I can do it better and cheaper” concept that is so prevalent in the MultiValue database market. Since the MultiValue database environment is so efficient and effective in developing applications that don’t take so much time or resources, we have a tendency to overlook all the tools that exist in the marketplace that have already solved many of the application problems and user demands.

Or we look at the tools and say to ourselves, “I can do that better and cheaper”. And we spend the 20% of our IT budget developing a tool that we could have purchased cheaper. Then, we spend a part of the 80% that should be spent on business systems maintaining tools developed in-house, when a third-party tool will always end up with more features and flexibility than we ever have time to program into the “in-house developed” tool

Take a look at the ROI of developing a tool vs. purchasing a tool — 60-200 hours of your time developing the tool is likely to cost you around $4,000-$14,000. Depending on the tools, you have already spent the license costs, plus a few years of support fees.

Now, look at the maintenance costs if you write the tool yourself — 20-500 hours a year on maintenance and add new functionality as needed. Again, ends up being around $4,000-$35,000 a year. Most yearly maintenance costs for these tools are less that this.

Using third-party tools is well worth it, and it allows you to spend more time on focusing on improving and innovating business systems instead of creating new tools.

Improving and innovating business systems is not solely a focus of fixing the bugs in the existing systems, but building the business software framework that can benefit from the new technologies that your CEO is demanding you put to use. More and more companies are looking at SaaS tools and applications to enhance the productivity of their business, as well.

SaaS business applications like SalesForce.com are becoming more and more prevalent in business applications for the same reason that third-party tools help your business. It costs less to have someone else maintain it and keep it current. Then the business can have their IT staff focus more on keeping your business running instead of the interfaces running.

Many companies don’t know, or are not told about, all the tools that exist to solve their problems. Now would be a good time to do a little research to see what tools exists that would make your job easier and cause your IT budget to be lower.

Remember, your CEO or company management is looking for ways to cut costs across the whole business, not just in the IT department. If the IT department can supply them with a tool that will save the company money, they will have no problem purchasing it.

Happy holidays to all!

It’s the end of the year - time to relax, family enjoyment, and gift giving - and time to start planning for 2009.

Now that 2009 is just around the corner, it is time for me to start talking about what is coming up: The International Spectrum Conference and Exhibition 2009 in Denver, Colorado on March 23rd – 26th. That is less than four months away.

Have you taken a look at the conference details yet? If not, please do. You’ll find many informative sessions that you shouldn’t miss. You will also find on the conference web site some documents and materials to help you justify attending the 2009 conference to your management. We all know how hard it is to explain to your management why it is important to go to any conference. Look through the materials in the “Why Attend?” section to see sample trip reports, a Letter to the Manager, and other information to help out.

You’ll also find a conference blog that contains other information you will find useful — from new sessions, to speakers’ posts on what they will cover in their sessions, to exhibitor information and events.

If you are having a hard time talking your management into paying for the attendance, don’t forget that the Exhibition Hall is FREE to all attendees and “walk-ins”. This gives you a chance to see all the tools, products, and enhancements from your favorite MultiValue vendors, including seeing new products that would benefit your company’s business systems.

The Exhibition Hall is open on Wednesday and Thursday. Full Conference attendees get to preview the Exhibition Hall on Tuesday night during the Preview Party.

To find out more on the 2009 Conference, visit:

http://www.intl-spectrum.com/conference/2009/

Look for the Conference Brochure landing on your desks soon with more helpful information.