As part of San Francisco’s Fleet Week event a couple weekends ago, I watched an amazing air show featuring the Blue Angels, the famous flying ambassadors of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. The Blue Angels often fly in diamond or delta formations within 18 inches of each other, and also do many other unconventional maneuvers, such as barrel rolls and flying upside down. I was very impressed with their precision, transparency (no optical illusions in this performance!), and speed.
Precision, transparency, and speed are among the top priorities of CIOs today, according to recent surveys by InformationWeek and IBM. Precision translates into a high demand for business intelligence for more employees, helping them to make the best decisions they can with available data. Transparency translates into making visualization, mashups, collaboration, and social media available to employees so that they can more easily share ideas based on comprehensive information from multiple sources. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence from companies such as Birst and eiVia, and SaaSenterprise mashup dashboards from vendors such as mashmatrix provide the speed required to get business results quickly and cost-effectively.
SaaS applications also free IT professionals to focus on business solutions and niche applications that may not have been possible with on-premises systems, which are more difficult to install, integrate, modify, and maintain. Examples of niche applications that translate into revenue include BranchIt for enterprise relationship management and Mimiran for price optimization.
Cloud computing also helps with green IT and sustainability strategies, according to a recent Aberdeen Group report, “Business Adoption of Cloud Computing.” The report states that sharing of data centers and virtualization of IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, networks, and security, reduces costs, energy consumption, and carbon emissions.
As we move out of a recession and on-premises systems into a recovery and cloud-based solutions, we’re taking off into a new era where business and IT may work together with precision, transparency, and speed even greater than the Blue Angels!
How is your organization defining and addressing needs for precision, transparency, and speed?
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