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As consumers demand and receive more from companies, IT will continue to receive more pressure to deliver services so the company can create value for the customer. In order to cope with this demand, IT leaders should decrease complexity, build one, three and five year plans and imitate business leaders.

SOA to the rescue
According to Forrester, nearly 70 percent of SOA users say they will increase their use of SOA, and 46 percent of large enterprise users of SOA use it for strategic business transformation.

SOA, when developed strategically, can increase business flexibility and help organizations create more value for the business by aligning business processes, customers and other pieces in the business chain.

Looking at SOA from a capacity management view, IT organizations must use modeling techniques to ensure service quality, plan for the future, and find and correct potential bottlenecks prior to negative impacts to production service quality.

For capacity planners who are modeling Web services and multi-tier transactions, such as those employed in an SOA environment, modeling can be used to:

• Predict the configuration needed to run an SOA-based application where multiple implementations for services have been eliminated in favor of one, with that one implementation most likely running on fewer servers than were previously used.
• Build annual business-driven technology plans that can be translated into budget expenses.
• Simulate the impact of changes to the production infrastructure without an expensive testing environment.
• Determine break points in shared components well in advance so corrective actions can be scheduled. This is especially important when several mission critical applications share a common component, lowering the tolerance for outages.

Create value for the business
Gartner recently surveyed more than 1,400 CIOs to determine priorities for 2006. The top three action items were to deliver projects that enable business growth, link business and IT strategies and plans, and build business skills in the IT organization.

Delivering projects that enable business growth was the number one priority for 2005 after being a lowly 18th in 2004. It is being suggested that CIOs and their executives must establish a track record of creating value faster than reducing IT costs, according to Gartner.

Build one, three and five year plans and refresh them every six months. Tie the individual plans into the department or business unit plan to see how it fits together. Ask a manager or work with another manager to see if the plans integrate with the company’s bigger picture and personal goals.

Imitate and differentiate
Be a voracious reader of information and look at situations from different angles. Consume vertically oriented trade journals, both IT-oriented and overall business trade journals.

These publications can give readers a hint at what’s happening with a competitor or discuss the next big thing (e.g., SOA).

Check out the competition and one-up them. Just because company A beat company B to the punch doesn’t mean there’s no room for success. Microsoft's Xbox is a behemoth in the gaming community along with early stalwarts Sony and Nintendo. Just tweaking a current process or doing a mundane task differently can help IT meet or exceed increasing business demands.