cash is kind

"cash is king" is a principle that many companies today have to follow. this simple means all decision must follow to increase cash flow.

for all activities and departments of a company with no direct impact to the core business process this means that they are forced to immediate reduce their budget to a minimum / essential value.

HR, IT, TechDoc, .... are examples for affected units.

the current situation is not designed for mid or long term investments in the mentioned buisness areas which "only" improves long term operation. what you need is short term benefit without too much investment.

good opportunity for outsourcing, isn't it? i expect significant amount of companies try to reduce their supporting activities through outsourcing services even if the services doesn't fit 100% to their specific needs and the missing parts isn't essential for daily operation.

what do you need for service outsourcing:

1. service function must be fully defined (in technical context this means that the interface must be fully defined)
2. service availability must be defined
3. service security must be defined
   =>what happens with the data maintained by a different organization?
4. service termination must be defined
   =>what happens if service is moved in-house again or moved to different service provider?
5. price must be defined
   =>pay per use / per time period / ?

having this in mind i expect increasing request to ASP / PaaS / SaaS / PRaaS buisness models and companies can provide such services in certain domains.

ASP
provide IT infrastructure (software & hardware) for daily operation for a dedicated amount of money.
=>IT assets based

PaaS
provide a dedicated platform to implement and host a application for a dedicated amount of money.
=>development asset based

SaaS
provide a dedicated set of software features for a dedicated amount of money.
=>software application / function based

PRaaS
provide a dedicated Process / Business function incl. the corresponding IT asserts for a dedicated amount of money.
=>business process based

the amount of semantic involved is increasing from top to down. therefore the potential value but also the potential risk for the requesting company increase. todays knowledge and IT infrastructure make usage of those business models not only possible for big, enterprise companies but also for mid and small size ones.

but beside few other points you still have to trust in trust if you want to go this direction.....

Buzzwording continues?

the IT industry is very innovative in creating and consuming buzzwords. from year to year at least one new trend alongside with one or more buzzwords are created.

main reason for that success is the corresponding visibility and based on that the opportunity to get budget. the main characteristic of such terms is that there are no formal definition of what is really the essence / definition of such term but on the other hand everybody seems to have a clear and complete understanding and definition for the term / buzzword.

second characteristic of such terms is that a common trend is associated with those terms.

and last but not least the life cycle of such trends are pretty similar, approx. 1/2 year until everybody is aware of it (through publications, blog posts, articles), 1 year highest awareness incl. associated investments and at the end the trend will be replaced by next one.

that looks pretty similar to fashion industry and in my point of view there is not too much structural differences between a new fashion trend and a IT trend.

just a small list of buzzwords from the last few years:

• ....
  
• SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
• xxx 2.0 (esp. Web 2.0)
• Semantic Web
  
• SaaS (Software as a Service)
• PaaS (Platform as a Service)
• Cloud computing
• .....
  

why is it possible to make money with those trends? because all of them promising to solve real existing problems in real industry. if we use the trends mentioned above their main focus is to

• consistent access to required information at the right time at the right place
  
• get rid of increasing IT complexity
• get rid of proprietary vendor driven information silos
• reduce Total cost of ownership for hosting the available information within a company
• improve collaboration between different business groups
• improve adaptability to changing business requirements
  
• ....

if we take the essence of the mentioned buzzwords and collect them again than the following is really promising

• usage of dedicated and well defined services for business automation
• pay for usage of a defined service level instead of paying for hardware / software and corresponding maintenance (what really cares is the service that automates a certain business step)
• architecture that adapts fast and controlled to change of business requirements (changed SLA) and not to changed IT requirements
  
• .....

the trends above of course drives the creation of standards, software and services makes those requirements easier to fulfill but still it still hard work and more than just using those nice buzzwords.....