Today’s C-suite leaders share that owning an IT infrastructure is not a core competency of their businesses and acquiring an infrastructure becomes less palatable unless the result directly contributes to improving the business or mission. However, they do want the end result — analytics and data discovery that will make the business more effective, efficient, and profitable.  

Big Data, the Internet of Things, B2B, new technology advances — all affect the way we improve business efficiencies, effectiveness, and mission.  They also provide a smart business opportunity to leverage someone else’s technology infrastructure. 

 Owning an IT infrastructure depends on how much, how big, how in-depth, how critical, complex, and sensitive the data is that you need to make decisions.  You may not want trade secrets and your intellectual secret sauce in a cloud run/maintained by somebody else unless they can guarantee the same support, availability, and security of your in-house team.

Be honest — IT is a support function.  If not improving the business, you’re wasting money and need to refocus on why the IT functions in the first place. The IT group is there to improve the bottom-line, just as your supply chain, financial, and contracting functions. To be smart about how you and the business approach the return you expect from your information technology investment, you need a data risk assessment that describes how you use it and how its support infrastructure fits your strategic vision and corporate objectives. 

 Leveraging data points across the enterprise improves C-suite decisions and leads to far better understanding of the relationships between functions and decisions.  However, there are likely whole groups of data assets outside the corporate relational database firewalls.  Analyzing ALL the data could mean expanding the infrastructure to gain new data discovery insights into how the business runs or could be more efficient, customer friendly, bottom-line invested. However, if your IT team is more concerned about building an IT kingdom and their shiny new data center technology, it may be time to re-assess how, where, and why the IT functions in the first place.  

 IT is about directly improving the business — not building an infrastructure fiefdom.  The CEO wants to know what the IT Infrastructure is doing for the bottomline.  Put your data where improvement gets done best.