By Gabriel Schild, Dennis Kolenbrander and Andrew Bruininga
Gabriel Schild is a senior manager of consulting and leads Cognizant Business Consulting in the Benelux and Nordics regions. Dennis Kolenbrander is a manager of consulting and focuses on business and technology alignment. Andrew Bruininga is a senior consultant and specializes in the use of technology in the Financial Services sector. All three authors are with Cognizant Consulting.
Over the last decade, IT has outgrown its supporting role in a company's operations to become a key enabler of all business functions. Nowadays, IT is such an integral part of any business that financial results have become highly dependent on it. While managing the IT function has largely been about improving efficiency and effectiveness, which influences shareholder value through optimization, process improvements and cost-containment, the long-held view of the CIO and the IT function as being a cost center has had repercussions on the role of the CIO in the corporation.
However, as world economies emerge from a period of turbulence and uncertainty, companies are increasingly recognizing that there is more to the business value of IT than efficiency and effectiveness. In pursuit of greater business value, they are now looking at more aggressive product, service and process innovation and virtualization based on new applications of IT.
Some are going a step further to leverage IT to radically rethink and redesign processing value chains into virtualized value webs: a series of companies each responsible for executing certain parts of the production chain of a product or a service. Just like the manufacturing supply chain has gone atomically global, we are seeing the services value chain also going atomically global. Without advanced IT solutions, such virtualization of business operations would not be possible.
There is a growing realization on the part of the executive management of companies that technology forms the cornerstone of not only the internal operations of the company, but also its external business headway vis-
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