Management Info System

Creating an Efficient Enterprise in the Virtual Era

Jeff Johnson and Kathy Karpinski

The Virtual Era encourages no separation between business strategy and IT execution. For the CIO, the Virtual Era represents an opportunity to recreate the role of CIO, redefine how IT is run and create business advantage through efficiency and innovation.

Creating an Efficient Enterprise in the Virtual Era

It happens every 15 years or so, new demands and innovative technologies come along to transform the way we work, the way we live, the way we communicate. What started with mainframes in the 1950s morphed into minicomputing by the time we put a man on the moon. The client-server model made computing power ubiquitous and helped transport the world into the Internet age. The old models don’t disappear – the dominance of the Internet certainly won’t fade anytime soon – but the opportunities afforded by new technologies inevitably build to a critical inflection point. We find ourselves at one of those inflection points today.

Welcome to the Virtual Era

This new age, the Virtual Era, is being driven by increased mobility demands and the widespread adoption of new technologies designed to abstract and virtualize enterprise infrastructure, services and processes from any given location or system. This evolution to anytime, anywhere data availability to thousands of new end-point devices makes IT infrastructure all the more complex, expensive and difficult to manage. To empower workers and drive productivity globally, organizations must adopt a new model of computing—an efficient architecture that reduces the cost and complexity of the data center and leverages the benefits of the cloud—so that IT can put the right amount of computing power at the fingertips of every employee, whenever and wherever they need it.

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The CIOs, CEOs and executive leaders who embrace these IT changes have an opportunity to out-innovate their competition. As IT becomes less of a support resource...