IT Value: How To Measure The Revenue Of IT

If you had to name the #1 problem that most CIOs face, what would it be? There are a lot to choose from, but in my opinion, the biggest problem that is holding CIOs and IT departments back from being considered a key component of the firm’s success is that all CIOs get to talk about is costs.

These days, HP does a lot more and we all probably have some HP printers or PCs laying around somewhere. However, it’s what HP’s CIO Randy Mott has been up that has caught my attention.

Let’s start with results because otherwise Randy’s story really isn’t worth telling: HP has cut IT spending from 4% or revenue to about 2% of revenue, 70% of staff’s time spent on new development with just 30% being spent on support, shrunk 85 data centers down to just 6, 6,000 applications shrunk down to 1,500. Wow – sure looks like Randy must be walking on water, eh?

Any CIO would lust after results like these. However the devil is, as always, in how Randy got them. Chris Murphy over at InformationWeek did some digging and found out that Randy had to do a number of things that would make even the strongest of us think twice.