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An opportunity for CIOs to grasp sustainability
Mohan Gandhi , Senior Sustainability Consultant , STG Advisors , explains the first , second and third ages , how this is relevant to sustainability and how CIOs can grasp it .
Enterprise sustainability is the act of getting the right data into the right hands at the right time to make the right decisions – what I call data fluency .
However , data fluency requires an enterprise to be somewhat IT mature . How else does one create , combine , deliver and act on the necessary data ? Only when an enterprise becomes IT mature can it begin to measure , then improve , sustainability . Long story short , IT maturity enables CIOs to grasp the sustainability agenda and we ’ re on the cusp of a new age of IT maturity – the Third Age of enterprise IT .
What is this Third Age ? What were the first and second ages ? How is this relevant to sustainability ?
The First Age – Siloed and subservient
First Age IT saw individual functional groups contribute their own expertise to different project phases . Silos made sense because they created accountability and this approach served the enterprise well .
However , projects became rigidly sequential and trapped in one speed . This model encouraged ‘ over the wall ’ engineering , where team members worked locally on immediate tasks without knowledge of upstream or downstream strategic or business context .
Different teams used a myriad of tools to monitor and manage application and infrastructure performance , user experience , conversions etc .
As a result , there was no single and consistent source of truth . Hence it was difficult for teams to identify the full context behind the data or collaborate with others to improve business outcomes .
The Second Age – New priorities , old delivery model
As businesses became more reliant on digital services , enterprise IT became more critical to an organisation ’ s ability to drive new revenue , enhance customer relationships , keep employees productive and safeguard business operations .
Over the last 20 years CIOs have continuously transformed their IT to keep pace with both technological advancements and changes to IT priorities .
The Second Age saw the role of enterprise IT transform from back-office support to essential business enabler . What once merely enabled the company strategy now actively defined it . www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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