IT directors at this week's Gartner Symposium in Cannes
will be urged to address complexity in the IT department by using
sophisticated portfolio management techniques to prioritise
projects.
The analyst group will advise users to focus on eliminating
older IT systems and consolidating where necessary to deliver rapid
results to the business.
Andy Kyte, a research fellow at Gartner, said users should focus
on delivering rapid results in the areas of the business that
matter and suggested focusing on one area that would make a big
difference, rather than splitting resources across many
projects.
"CIOs are suffering from initiative fatigue," he said. "There
are too many projects; too many things are competing for
resources."
One of the key problems for IT departments is that they support
not only new IT systems but also the old systems that the new ones
are supposed to replace. Kyte said, "Very few CIOs have a process
to remove components from their portfolio."
He recommended users put in place sophisticated portfolio
management systems to help them assess all ongoing projects and
ascertain why they are running them.