Five Current Priorities of IT Industry Leaders

Mr. Peter Schroer is the founder, chairman and president of Aras, which provides product lifecycle management solutions. During the past two decades, Mr. Schroer has had manufacturing and engineering business roles at IBM, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Data General.

Here, Mr. Schroer outlines 5 top priorities for IT industry leaders and decision makers for a recent issue of eWeek.

Focus IT Projects on High-Value Business Goals

Priorities have transformed overnight, bringing a new urgency to cost-cutting measures and initiatives that will drive the business forward in the face of economic uncertainty. IT leaders must look hard at alignment and corporate goals and think out of the box to accelerate projects that will help the company compete and even take advantage of the downturn.

Challenge the “Big Box” System Fallacy

Today, IT has to challenge the viability and logic of the “suite will do everything” mentality. The business can’t afford that answer, and cannot wait two, three or four years for capabilities that the company needs now. IT executives in senior management must find new alternatives that are cost-effective and quick to deploy, or the CEO and board will find someone else who can deliver.

Leverage SOA to Cut Costs

One of the best ways to cut project costs and deliver results more quickly is to stop trying to rip and replace all of the old systems each time a new one comes along. Major replacements are long and expensive. With a smart SOA (service-oriented architecture) approach, companies can do more with less. Vendors have tried to frame the SOA concept in their terms to sell IT new packages; however, SOA is really vendor-neutral. It comes down to using XML and SOAP messaging to interface between wrap around systems to expose and exchange information in new ways that provide more flexibility than was previously possible.

Expand the Use of Enterprise Open Source

Several years ago, open source meant Linux. Not anymore. These days, there are one or more high-quality open-source solutions in every software category. “Enterprise open source” typically means that a solution is sufficiently robust to complete directly with conventional proprietary offerings on functionality and capabilities, and that there is a company standing behind the solution to provide enterprise-class support and value-added services. The real business benefits of the open source come from the licensing format that removes the up-front capital expense for licenses and enables companies to prove out solutions before committing.

Renegotiate the Big Contracts

When push comes to shove, everyone has to share the pain. When IT executives take a hard look at expenses to find savings, there are usually three to five line items in the budget that jump off the page. These are the major provider agreements that have been entered into in the past and now jeopardize corporate profitability. To achieve real savings, IT will need to renegotiate contracts of magnitude.

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Safran North America Releases Proteus Product into North American Market
Market-tested Project Integration and Intelligence Product introduced to new market

Albuquerque, NM (PRWEB) July 2, 2009 — Safran North America (SNA), one of the world’s leading manufacturers and distributors of project management applications, announced today that it has added Proteus to its product offerings to serve the North American market.

Over seven years in development and proofing in the most demanding project management environments in transnational corporations, Proteus is an integration and intelligence application that connects to project and/or enterprise information regardless of location, database system or underlying application. It is based on .NET it can access geographically dispersed data sources over the web as well as secure networks. In summary, Proteus is a virtual multi-application smart client operating across an organization with security attributes for each user or group of users in addition to any security acquired from the database.

“We are extremely excited about the capabilities that Proteus offers to our market ,” said Safran North America CEO, Nicholas Pisano. “We expect that Proteus will be a game-changer, particularly since it leverages the next generation of tools, by-passing the dead-end reliance on OLAP or Cubes to achieve data integration. Turning data from disparate systems into corporate information aggregated as appropriate based on a user’s role in the organization.”

read the full article here..