Don't Just Stand There - Get Ready

Computerworld - When the recession came, Ed Bell just said no. The CIO at Commonwealth Financial Network in Waltham, Mass., knew that competitive pressures in the investment brokerage business wouldn't allow his IT staff to slack off during the downturn, so he took a pragmatic approach to the present that's also preparing his staff for the future.
When 2001 closed with revenue down, Bell was forced to reduce his IT staff by 10%. Early this year, he delayed some infrastructure upgrades and avoided what he calls "significant" new costs by consolidating servers rather than buying new ones for new applications. Then, he focused about a third of his projects on productivity enhancements that cut costs and put Commonwealth in a good position for an upturn.
Those tactical moves let Bell concentrate the other two-thirds of his projects on strategic initiatives. One such project provides multidimensional views of millions of aggregated data records. This enables Commonwealth and its customers to benchmark against the competition.
"Those are strategic things that you've got to do," Bell says. "When things loosen up, I'll be that step ahead of the competition." This is because tactical projects will have strengthened his staffers' skills in workflow management technologies, such as imaging. Strategic projects will have enhanced their next-generation online analytical processing skills.
With cutbacks and layoffs, not everyone has the resources to move ahead with strategic projects. But even if the recession has forced you to cut back on projects, you can use this time to assess your skill base, figure out what you'll need and get organized to hit the ground running when your budget loosens.
First, get your bearings. The downturn may have shifted business strategy and resources, so you may need to regroup. "Focus on basics," advises Lawrence Brunelle, CEO of Blue Element Consulting Inc., an IT consulting firm in Pleasanton, Calif. Understand your organization's strategy and your capabilities, from hardware and software to infrastructure and people. Know what's in place and what's needed to support new goals.
"If you haven't done an IT skills assessment, do it now," says Betty Calhoun, director of special projects at the information management support division of DynCorp, a government contractor in Reston, Va. Find out your employees' strengths and weaknesses, what they know and what kind of projects they have worked on in the past.
Then, see how those skills correspond to projects that will flow when the economy improves. For example, Brunelle's clients say that when confidence returns, they'll be investing in IT projects to enhance marketing, sales