Today, at Novartis and elsewhere, it's become hard to separate it from plain old business. But the pressure to rewire just about every business activity imaginable with Internet technologies is having considerable impact on corporate IT organizations. Indeed, there is evidence that many companies are floundering. A survey of 53 CEOs conducted by Transition Partners Co., a Reston, Virginia-based consulting firm, found that only half the respondents consider their IT departments to be stable. The remainder said that shifting business strategies, competitive pressure, turnover, and other factors have left their technology organizations in flux.
Many companies now say yes, but there's no consensus on how to restructure to best advantage.
New York Life Insurance Co. That's one answer, and a number of companies, such as Ingersoll-Rand Co., are doing just that. Some companies are critical of this approach, while others embrace first one answer, then another, suggesting that in the Internet Age, technology isn't the only thing that changes constantly. While ebusiness often receives special treatment within the walls of organizations, some companies insist that the proper approach is to embed the necessary skills and expertise within the existing structure. We want a full convergence of ebusiness projects and traditional IT projects, and you can't do that with two separate IT organizations. Making that happen depends largely on training or, more accurately, retraining.