Cloud Apps Critical Requirement No 10: Liberation from Non-Strategic IT Issues

Cloud applications should free environmental managers and their company’s IT Departments and their teams from time and energy spent on non-strategic, back-office IT operations and software coding. Today and into the future, the most highly valued CIOs—the ones that become heroes to the business—are those whose actions are closely aligned with strategic business initiatives and drive the IT projects that support those initiatives.

Environmental managers and executives should be able to focus on the business processes and subject matter, and the value they bring to their organization, and not on the nuts-and-bolts of technology and IT infrastructure. If environmental managers and their departments are doing things someone else could do, like software development and maintenance, then things that only they can do are not being done. A data center is a commodity, and a company that specializes in running a data center is going to do it better than environmental or even IT department can. And that frees environmental professionals up to do what they do best, which is to focus on strategic work and innovations and find ways to provide true business value, lower the compliance cost, automate reporting, reduce environmental liability, and ultimately lower the operational cost while increasing their company’s brand value.