Lack of Time and Resource

There is a severe lack of time and resource to build the proper infrastructure. Many of the issues we've highlighted have already been identified. They are on that infamous list of goals year in and year out. These issues have been on the back burner for too long. New technology or new systems continue to take precedence. It's the same story no matter where we go. The pendulum will never shift back to the way we built infrastructures in the 1970s and 1980s when the infrastructure was priority number one and everything else was a lesser priority. However, the proportion of 90 percent applications development and 10 percent infrastructure development will be the death of client/server computing because the system will fail, and so will its leaders.

If you heard from the CIOs we listened to, you would hear their argument that on the one side they have a Vice President of Applications Development and on the other side they have a VP of Infrastructure or Operations, both with large budgets and extensive staffs. They claimed that because of their organization's large staff and budget for infrastructure, they spent nearly half their time on operations. But, they also admitted that they focused most of their energies on applications development, not really understanding the issues with their infrastructure. It's a matter of focus. Until CIOs concentrate on improving the structure of their organization, they won't have RAS with networked client/server computing.

So, the role of the CIO is to harness the available resources, decide what projects can be undertaken to succeed, and set up a viable measurement system so that the organization knows how it's performing on daily, mid-range, and long-range basis.