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Winnipeg-based furniture manufacturer Palliser Furniture Ltd. has been undertaking a process of easing its system management for the last three years. CIO Canada talks with Jason Bergeron talks about the difficulties involved and his team's successes

If not planned in a careful way and overseen with vigilance, IT systems can easily grow into complicated beasts that are hard to manage, overly expensive and, ultimately, a roadblock to corporate success. For many firms, simplifying their systems is the key to ensuring that IT is more of a help than a hindrance. Winnipeg-based furniture manufacturer Palliser Furniture Ltd. has been undertaking its own simplification process for the last three years. CIO Jason Bergeron talks about the difficulties involved and his team's successes.

CIO CANADA: Can you put into words how difficult it is to keep IT simple?

BERGERON: There is a lot of pressure from the business to keep adding functionality or features or infrastructure for all the different stakeholders in the company, whether it is R&D or production, the manufacturing group, or sales. There are all these different agendas that are happening at the same time, putting pressure on an IT organization to deliver. It's very easy to just keep reacting to the next thing the business wants and to keep adding to applications or infrastructure over time, until you have this great big mess that no one can manage.

CIO CANADA: What philosophy do you bring to your work to make sure that doesn't happen at Palliser?

BERGERON: Always ask the business what they are trying to achieve with their request, because a lot of times they will come to you with a solution and just want you to implement it. So really be up front and?make sure that whatever you're looking to buy will fit in with what you have. I have found that IT organizations will overprovision, so you end up with a big data centre because you think you're going to grow. You end up with more network capacity than you're going to need and more servers than you need. A lot of that...

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