How Overhauling IT Was a Life-Saver For the American Cancer Society

Lemeowski writes: American Cancer Society CIO Jay Ferro lets readers peek behind the curtain of the nonprofit's IT organization, saying that when he took on the role a little over three years ago, the nonprofit had 12 different divisions — each with its own independent IT set-up and more than 600 independent applications in its portfolio. In the past three years, Ferro has aligned the entire IT organization into one global entity, consolidating dozens of data centers into three; increasing spending on strategic projects from 5 percent to 40 percent, and reducing 600 core systems down to fewer than 200. His journey is a powerful reminder that while streamlining IT can often be painful upfront for IT managers, the payoff for sticking with it, especially for nonprofits, can feed into saving more lives.

Comments

Information-poor article

[Jesrad]

I read the linked article hoping for insight on how to identify redundant infrastructure, steer divergent IT departments towards common solutions, or at least practical examples of uniformisation / centralization of *something*, anything, but there were none. It's all just a tech-free summary of the guy's accomplishments, as you'd present in a management meeting to tout your success as an IT manager. That's good for him and for the ACS, I guess, but it's pretty pointless to post it here.