CIOs bet on SOA, mobility for best biz strategies

he industry analysts found that enterprises with best-in-class IT strategies
for selecting and deploying disruptive technologies significantly outperformed
their competitors across a broad range of customer-facing and business
performance indicators. "The most successful
IT strategies involve prioritizing those disruptive technologies with the
greatest potential to enable winning in a highly fluid and complex customer and
partner environment,” says Stan Elbaum, Aberdeen Group senior vice-president
of research and author of the report.

To confront change and align the IT organization with business goals,
Elbaum's research suggests that CIOs take the following actions:

• Lead regular strategic planning meetings focusing on external drivers and
  corporate-wide responses.
• Measure customer satisfaction in business terms often enough to manage
  issues, rather than merely record trends.
• Maintain a current list of potentially disruptive technologies,
  understanding their potential value to the firm and to competitors.
• Adopt consistent, firm-wide, business-relevant financial metrics to gauge
  IT costs and value.
• Validate priorities of new technologies -- and the impact of regulatory or
  competitive initiatives -- with business units for a consistent, firm-wide
  position regarding investment.

“The dynamics and volatility of the competitive landscape are compelling
forward-thinking CIOs to adopt SOA and provide remote support and advanced
analytics for the distributed enterprise. It's a whole new ballgame for the
winning CIO agenda,” notes Elbaum.