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

First Post with good info

[randalware]

IT leadership is lacking in most companies.

The idea a good manager can manage anything is wrong.

After many years, I had a friend in manager ask me a question or two outside the office.
He had been in many management roles, and was working as a project manager for some major Oracle DB projects.

After explaining and doing a short lesson on all the major tech terms the DBs & system admin use.

I asked what does management understand.
On time (or not), Manpower Head count & budget.

They almost never have a clue about the interaction of the systems, quality, maint, network (or any infrastructure) & replacement (timing)
One manager I worked for needed a powerpoint to explain why upgrading the memory in the main unix server was needed,
after all we had just install 8gb in his PC.

Buy another tape cabinet with every project - BOFH (?)