'IT Modernization Should Be Top Priority For CIOs'

Tej Kohli is passionate about IT. Read an article quoted from networkcomputing.
IT management teams must place modernizing strategic planning at the core of their 2008 objectives and immediately apply this capability to IT modernization efforts, according to Gartner. By year-end 2010, more than one-third of all application projects will be driven by the need to deal with technology or skills obsolescence.
Gartner defines IT modernization as a movement that includes market forces, strategies and approaches to manage the ongoing, coordinated evolution of the business process, application and supporting technology portfolios to achieve an optimized value, cost and risk objective.
“Our research with thousands of clients across multiple geographic locations and industries shows that most CIOs are struggling to cope with a set of portfolios in which an overwhelming percentage of the artifacts need to be retired and replaced within a comparatively short period of time — between 2008 and 2015,” said Dale Vecchio, research vice president at Gartner.
“The scale of obsolescence in the set of portfolios is a major problem in its own right, but it is compounded by the lack of integrated planning capability within many IT management teams,” said Andy Kyte, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “IT modernization cannot be addressed as a short-term panic-response project because it is large and complex, and it requires the wholehearted commitment of all the IT management team and many of the business clients as well.”