In the current economic and business environment, every organisation is looking to grow the business, find better ways to stay connected with the customers and  retain competitive edge. Despite the fact that economic conditions are tight oranisations have to make investments and realign IT systems for survival and growth. The challenging situation for senior executives can be summed up as – How do you invest and yet reduce costs.

 At such a challenging point, it is important to look at holistic picture. The key is to consider total business transformation and create a execution plan. Some of the essential elements of business transformation are :

• Being agile;
• Building communities for collaboration and innovation;
• Cost optimization.

Being agile is very important for orgnisation’s sustenance and growth. Its ability to adopt and respond to the fast changing environment is the key to its survival. Cloud technologies has emerged as a powerful tool that makes organisation’s IT agile and helps in scaling up or scaling down. In the history of computing there was never a way to scale down the investment in quick time. But with on-demand computing infrastructure powered by cloud technologies organisations can scale down the infrastructure during off-peak time. This is an unprecedented development which organization should consider as an important reason to embrace cloud technologies.

The technologies behind Social, Mobile and Cloud have created level playing field even for smaller organizations. Still it is not the technology alone that helps to create an environment of innovation. The key to success is creating right culture – the culture of collaboration and community building – from top to bottom- within the organization.  Many organisations are striving to achieve this culture. Open source software development process is the best place to study how collaboration across geographical boarders have helped create communities and drive innovation.

When it comes to cost reduction – many organisations simply slash the budgets. But the smarter way to address the costs is to look at the cost optimization. It is imperative to look at returns generated from every dollar invested in technologies – specially when they are commoditized. In the IT investment, many technologies especially in the infrastructures space – server OS, middleware, databases, virtualization etc – are commoditized. That means there are many alternatives available at much lower costs to the same functionalities provided by large vendors who sell their software at very high cost and software is based on proprietary licenses. Open source software has driven the commoditization and brought down the cost dramatically.

The cost optimization should look at carrying out the switch from expensive, vendor locked-in software to open source software. There are certain switching costs, but that it gives you good returns.