By Tom Farre

In today's economy, the need for practical innovation is a driving force behind many software deployments. But IT leaders are under pressure to deliver fast time-to-value with their software solution implementations, meaning they must deliver hard benefits quickly and within budget. "Two- and three-year deployments hardly exist anymore," says Adam Elster, Corporate Senior VP and General Manager, CA Services. The final stage of a software solution implementation — the "last mile," if you will — is where organizations take full advantage of the business benefits. CIOs enter the last mile when their software solutions are successfully deployed into production. It's also when much of the solution's value is achieved and fully realized. The quality of an implementation determines whether value is fully realized — and how quickly it is realized, industry experts say.

Today, IT and business-unit executives expect software projects to deliver value quickly. In fact, many CIOs expect incremental improvements, including initial production rollout, in as little as two to three months, and a return on investment (ROI) in 12 months, says Timothy Beditz, VP of Product Marketing at CA. "Whether we are being asked to help the customer to accelerate below-the-line savings or drive above-the-line revenue growth, we are in a unique position to do so with a combination of great technology, world-class implementation services, education and support," he adds.

Software's last mile can be especially challenging for CIOs who have multiple data center environments steeped in such technologies as virtualization, service-oriented architecture and unified communications. In such environments, application dependencies are all too often unclear and undocumented. That's why management tools are more important than ever. "You need a broad perspective to understand how all the pieces of the project fit together," says Elaina Stergiades, a Senior Research Analyst at IT research firm IDC.