Business success cannot be achieved without clearly focused strategic IT management within the company, nor without utilizing services of so-called cloud computing.
These current topics were presented on Wednesday at the second Business-Technology Conference of Hewlett-Packard in Zagreb by IT experts Nenad Marjanović from Hewlett-Packard and Ratko Mutavdžić from Microsoft Croatia. The large attendance at their lectures, which gathered IT directors from telecommunications, financial and state institutions, as well as IT consultants, indicates that they hit the mark.
Nenad Marjanović emphasized that one of the most common problems he regularly encounters in the field while working with companies is the response that IT strategy cannot be planned, but only reacted to changes in business.
– There should be no difference in strategic IT management among industries. Everyone must strive to be faster, clearly define what the core business is, support all business requirements that arise, and focus on revenue generation – stated Marjanović.
The transformation of IT involves defining the path, controlling it, initiating transformation, and verifying whether these goals have been achieved and whether they are correct, and experts like Marjanović help with this, who also reflected on the current state of the crisis and cost-cutting.
– It is not strategic IT management when you decide not to invest in services that competitors are investing in during a crisis. Think again about how wise it is that you have introduced a measure of savings by not investing in e-commerce if in a year your competition holds 60 percent of the market in that channel – warned Marjanović.
One form of savings for many companies is paying for cloud computing services at a pre-agreed price, which allows them to plan costs more clearly. Regarding a very common question among IT directors and company directors about which supplier would be the most cost-effective to purchase cloud services from, Ratko Mutavdžić from Microsoft stated that it is first necessary to clearly distinguish that the largest service providers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google offer different cloud computing services, depending on the provider. Thus, there are cloud applications, cloud platforms, and cloud servers (hardware). The challenges for companies, service providers, and users will be, according to Mutavdžić, how to connect all clouds and transfer applications from Google’s cloud to Microsoft’s and vice versa. The issue of data ownership and their transfer remains to be resolved.
– It is clear that in the cloud you give up part of your privacy, but at the same time, it brings you more advantages. The trend in IT is certainly cloud, but the question is what it will be in ten years – stated Mutavdžić.
