Is this the right time for businesses to invest in IT ?

Recession is the only real time where the organizations get enough time to re-think and make radical changes to their strategic assets. While in boom the best you can afford to do is continuous improvement; you normally can’t afford to experiment and re-engineer your core business processes (and IT assets supporting them) while you’re overwhelmed with customer orders; you can only tinker them that much.
Realizing the fact, that more agile your organization is the more likely it is to survive (and even thrive) in difficult business climate. While the competition due to lack of flexibility and agility might fall over its own weight, an agile company would be able to snatch the market-share from their fat competitors by being more adaptive and hence competitive. This will be true now (during the shrinking market during recessions) as well as tomorrow (when the market expands again)
Therefore before considering an IT investment, its strategic alignment with business objective shouuld be clear. The business objective should be to tranform yourself into a robust and agile enterprise which thrives in changing market conditions. If an IT investment is aligned with this key objective, it should be very seriously considered – even financed from external channels.
One thing is for sure that during tough times tinkerers ought to die! There’s no more room for continuous improvement during crazy times. Its time for making some bold and radical decisions and a strategic alignment of IT investment with such decisions is sure to give both a short-term and long-term advantage.
In light of the need to get both robust and agile, I believe SOA technologies would top the list of IT agenda for the enterprises.



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