CIO Playbook: The network as strategic asset
"The biggest trend is the need to treat networking as a strategic investment and not an expense to be minimized. Digital transformation depends on an up-to-date network. Year over year, enterprises reduce the spend on networking and end up behind. Enterprises need an agile flexible network that is in the data center, on the campus and across the wide areas. They also need the ability to connect to multiple clouds. Over the last five years, whether as a percent of IT spend, or total cost, networking has gone down. Investment in digital business has gone almost vertical, while investment in networking has gone down because it is seen as tactical.
Joe Skorupa
CIO Playbook: CMO and CIO better together
Integrate marketing silos
"In 2018, CIOs need to work with the business to connect marketing technology with the business's overall technology strategy. Marketing technology now consumes data from across the enterprise and has wide-ranging implications for customer engagement across all touchpoints and throughout the customer journey.
"Unfortunately, because marketing technology is highly dynamic and distributed across internal owners and external parties such as agencies, martech is too often considered a stand-alone entity apart from business technology. But high-performing customer experience firms will bypass silos when the CIO and CMO work together to create a body of technology that can win, serve and retain customers consistently within the enterprise's strategy for technology, infrastructure, data and security."
-- JOE STANHOPE, principal analyst at Forrester
Joe Stanhope
INSIGHTS & PERSPECTIVES
"Part of the problem is that networking teams have not been able to explain the importance of network investment to CIOs. They talk about speeds and feeds. As a result, CIOs tend to think about the bottom line in terms of cutting costs, rather than the top line of supporting new business initiatives. CIOs don't think twice about budgeting for more compute and storage. They have just assumed the network is already there and we don't need anything new. Gartner has a strategic planning assumption that organizations that fail to treat networking as a strategic investment will be three times as likely to fail in digital business transformation."
-- JOE SKORUPA, distinguished analyst at Gartner
Treat networking as a strategic investment
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