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Test Instructions: Please read the excerpt below and answer the questions that follow.

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The CEO's role in IT decisions: Keep it simple.

Look both ways, Knowing when to act :

To avoid IT investment disasters, corporations must rethink when and how senior management's talents should be tapped.

By Bill Carico

Action Items for the CEO

Keep the IT architecture/infrastructure simple. Successful technology projects today are those that break down complex tasks into smaller, simpler pieces. Examples of these tasks would include security, resource management, workload management, change management, network management, data management, etc. Unsound IT infrastructures are loaded with unnecessary complexity, which ultimately results in higher support costs. Numerous studies report that personnel and related development and support costs already represent from 1/2 to 3/4 of technology budgets. Management should take note because labor costs can vary greatly by platform and are increasing over time while the cost of hardware and software is decreasing.

Insist on rigorous pilot testing that clearly demonstrates proof-of-concept before you approve any major overhauls of your IT infrastructure. Beware of consultants who try to move your focus away from a technical architecture to one that requires you be synchronized with your strategic business vision. Many consultants/advisors have falsely assumed that a decentralized IT model provides the best support for a decentralized business model. For most large organizations, this is simply not true. As numerous fashion victims can attest, a collaboration between centralized and distributed systems leverages the strengths each model has to offer. While many have a financial interest in defining client/server to exclude the centralized mainframe, companies with several hundred end-users frequently fail using this definition.