Winners successfully manage change

Beyond the existing, ever-expanding and immediate business requirements demanding change, a series of new technologies and complex mandates and regulations require IT to adapt faster than ever before.

Since the computer's inception, every business decision has triggered a series of IT events. The ability to manage change increasingly differentiates the companies that win from the rest of the pack.

The axiom that 'the only constant is change' has been an inescapable business reality since the beginning of the computer age.

Transformation faces us every day-we need to be able to react to new business opportunities, respond to ever-changing government regulatory requirements as well as adapt and innovate our technology while delivering information faster, more efficiently, and to more places than ever before.

Yet no single change occurs in isolation. For example, if you're a health care company about to embrace new mobile computing technologies, you'll probably also be required to tackle new issues regarding security, application integration and printing while ensuring Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, (HIPAA), compliance.

Or, if you're a publicly traded company rolling out a new customer relationship management (CRM) system, you'll need to incorporate additional steps related to business continuity, and information storage and retrieval to meet the mandates of Sarbanes-Oxley. And you'll need to consider the overriding business processes that sit on top of the technology and how they wind their way through the enterprise.

Well-managed change improves the health of your corporation. It's change 'that would do you good.' The key in today's rapidly evolving environment is to thrive on change. To embrace it and to ensure IT remains an increasingly competitive asset of your corporation.

Today's enterprises require an IT that is highly adaptable to new business initiatives while using technology to deliver predictable, innovative solutions at a lower total cost of ownership and with reduced risk. It requires change that embraces industry-standard architectures, modular components and consistent implementations.

For some, the very notion of change becomes ominous, replete with threats of impending havoc. The reason is simple: lack of standardization induces fear because of requirements for a great deal of manual intervention, the creation of custom application interfaces and the possible updating of vendor software-all tasks with a high track record of error.

While much has changed throughout the years, many issues remain the same and errors that result from lack of standardization are substantially magnified when applications run on an infrastructure that is monolithic and silo-like. For many companies, fear of change-or fear of the consequences of change-has resulted in over-provisioning of infrastructure for 'just-in-case' purposes along with a subsequent increase in staff to manage the complex, unwieldy environment.

Further, the increasingly complex environment also increased the time gaps between business decision and IT deployment. Today's CIOs can no longer live in a world where business decisions reached within four weeks take three to six months-or more-to implement.

More than corporate requirements: outside forces drive change. Chances are requirements for change will continue at a relentless-and probably even faster-pace. In addition to pursuing corporate business opportunities, several global factors today greatly influence the need to adapt.

For example, expansion of global markets such as China and an expanded European Union will present new opportunities for international corporations while regulations place pressure on corporations to collect, securely store, analyze and share critical business information while having in place the appropriate business processes needed to effectively provide the appropriate action as dictated by law.

For many corporations, compliance represents the most difficult challenge because it requires information transparency and management across functional silos.

Today's leading companies align their IT and their business, synchronizing them to capitalize on change. IT is run like a business for the business using metrics for truly measuring return on investment, experiencing a profound shift in financial accountability.

In fact, many companies tell us that the lines of distinction between IT and business are fading. Instead of IT-only projects, these companies have business projects with IT ramifications where the CIO plays an integral role.

They are interested in purchasing only the technology they need, allowing resources to be dynamically allocated as needed by business processes, and implementing change in a planned, controlled manner as quickly as required by the corporation. They wish to eliminate the delays between business decision and IT implementation.

Today, the requirements needed to support a single new business initiative run as several horizontal layers throughout your enterprise, rendering obsolete the individual silos of technology of the past 30 years. Instead, these horizontal layers emphasize the need for a standards-based technology framework that easily adapts to rapidly changing business requirements.

That framework is found in the HP Adaptive Enterprise. The core of the HP Adaptive Enterprise is standards-based framework that creates a new level of integration between business and IT, lowers acquisition and operating costs, and provides an evolutionary path to an adaptive infrastructure that helps you facilitate, manage and embrace change.

The Adaptive Enterprise is real. HP is delivering against this architecture today, and it builds on the expertise and the experience we gained as we integrated the IT infrastructure of HP and Compaq during the past year.

We're bringing to our customers the expertise, tools, people, services, products and the discipline that we've used and developed as we accomplished our own massive IT integration. And we've done it with industry-standard architectures, modular components and consistent implementations.

Just to give you a sense, when we brought these two companies together, we had more than 7,000 applications and 160,000 employees in 167 countries.

We are actually the largest e-commerce transactor in the world. We had 260,000 total e-mail addresses. And, using our reference architecture, our processes, our products, our people, and our services, we were able to pull all that together and do business as one company on Day One.'