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Top CIO challenges for 2009: Cisco

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: Here, VC Gopalratnam, Chief Innovation Officer, Cisco India, presents his views on the top CIO challenges for the coming year.

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1. Prioritisation: CIOs will clearly have to identify the most critical projects that are aligned to the organisation’s business goals; those will need to stay on track and others might have to be deferred or de-prioritised.

2. Cost rationalisation: IT managers will reassess costs: power utilization,  real-estate impacts, bandwidth, software/hardware license costs, staffing, exploration of lease versus buy options, optimization of outside services spend and identification of what works best in terms of return-on-investment and total cost of ownership

3. Emphasis on efficiency will compel CIOs to realign and streamline IT resources, people and processes.  Re-alignment of computing resources almost becomes a way of life.

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4. More for less: Business leaders will expect IT leaders and managers to be more creative and innovative with the IT investments as budgets reduce.

5. Data centre consolidation: This will be high on every leader’s agenda to ensure optimal utilisation of existing resources and assets. Virtualisation will play a big role in the near future as IT organisations morph into more and more of a services management framework.

6. Regulatory compliance will continue to be key especially as organisations continue to globalise; operating in different geographies and eco-systems will place a lot of emphasis on doing the right thing and on meeting localisation needs.

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7. Quality assurance: Business will expect high standards of quality as usual; and despite strains on IT resources, quality cannot be compromised.  Operational excellence is even more vital in tough economic environments such as what we have now.

8. Green IT: Going green marries corporate social responsibility with cost management. CIOs will need to closely assess the cost benefits associated with green practices so they are justified and stay on course.

9. Infrastructure resilience and security: These are priorities for any CIO but managing and planning for this in tough times will be a challenge. Physical security is also a priority apart from data security.

10. Legacy systems management: Integrating legacy applications and making them work with new systems has always been and will continue to be a challenge. In environments such as what as what we are facing now, retiring unwanted and under-utilized-legacy applications is a big cost saving for organisations.