Companies waste £35bn on ill-conceived IT projects

Sandhya S M

BANGALORE: A Gartner study reports that companies waste nearly £35 billion
each year on ill conceived IT projects. Revealing this information, Bill Rann,
head-Global Governance Practice & member-Business Continuity and Security,
BT, said, “Outsourcers should have focused growth strategies before embarking
on new projects by way of building strong competence and domain expertise. Firms
need to build relationships on strong service level agreements (SLA) and robust
delivery models.”

Addressing a session on “BPO
Best Practices: Quality, Security compliances and technology innovation,” at
the ninth Nasscom India ITES-BPO strategy summit, he spoke on some of the key
outcomes of ill-conceived projects. Quoting a s404 auditing report which
addresses the financial risks, he said that globally companies have orphaned
nearly 2 million user access Ids and there are 150,000 spread sheets floating
across the network, which amounts colossal waste of resources.

“Companies need to understand that IT audit and control assessments could
avert such networked IT disasters. Optimizing end-end processes ensures
operational and control excellence,” he revealed.

Firms can increase shareholder value only if they have developed and
implemented effective strategies and efficient capital structures. Focusing on
core competency ensures reliability of business operations resulting exceptional
returns. Exposure to regulatory and stakeholder values mitigates risk management
ensuring success path and driving business growth, he said.

Speaking at the same session on “Emerging network architecture for BPO
industry” Sukhbir Singh Sethi, Principal Consultant — IT Services, Cisco
Systems, India & SAARC, said, “Some of the key challenges that bog BPOs
are on demand provisioning and database resource optimization and
virtualizations. The challenges are compounded by M&As with diversities of
problems such as security isolation, business firewalling and others”.

However, network virtualization helps to mitigate these issues by way
building closed user groups, which ensures private, secure and independent
processes. Consolidation policies and services enable simplified deployments and
sharing of network intelligent services and desktops lowers operating costs, he
said.

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