Your CIO may have a good-sized office, but chances are it’s too small to contain the elephant in the room. The elephant is always muttering about the looming mandate to restructure the IT department in our new virtual, services-driven world. It means business (outcomes). Organizations need to evolve to meet a host of new demands and expectations.
Technology shifts like cloud computing and dramatic improvements in virtualization have remade the CIO career trajectory. More than ever, as IT defines the very essence of a business, the enterprise has seen the CIO evolve from being a ‘function’ leader to a ‘business strategy’ leader. Today, you hear CIOs make statements like, “We are more focused on business outcomes than technology.”
The new CIO contributes to growth and strategic advantage through technology. How, exactly, does this work? Talk is great, but action is what counts. The elephant may be silent but the CIO can hear him. The answer involves rethinking and realigning IT organizations. For instance, internal customers are no longer well-served by IT solutions that are based on disparate equipment and management tools in the data center.
The IT department must adapt, replacing the traditional, divided data center that consisted of separate departments for hardware, network and storage with standards-based tools and processes as well as unified organizational structures. New tooling and cloud platforms facilitate this transition because virtualization and the cloud eliminate most of the friction that has typically been involved in making things happen in the data center.
Now, the previously “siloed” specialist, who might have focused solely on storage, for example, can become a generalist. A team of generalists is inherently more agile than specialists. With a Hybrid IT management platform that seamlessly spans the public cloud, private cloud and on-premises IT assets, the generalist can deploy and modify business-facing solutions more quickly and easily than was possible before.
Some refer to this new approach as IT as-a-Service (ITaaS). It confers procedural efficiencies through automated provisioning, monitoring, and management. Whatever the IT department needs to do, whether it’s deploying a server or provisioning storage, the process is available on demand as a service through a single management console. There are a lot fewer tasks requiring wires, pliers and appliances on physical racks. Done right, ITaaS and related Hybrid IT strategies release staff from repetitive tasks – freeing up time to focus more on business objectives.
Consider the following example that compares how IT department realignment and reorganization works with new management tools and a hybrid cloud/on-premises approach. Up until recently, each separate IT group (storage, network, etc.) would do its own work to deploy a new business application on-premises. This process might be a little slow and cumbersome, but it works.
Today, though, the business might expect a new application to be deployed more quickly. The application itself may also be quite complex, with integrations spanning multiple third parties and data resources. The traditional departmental structure will not support this well. Instead, ITaaS, working from a standards-based platform can enable a streamlined deployment of the application and any subsequent modifications.
Items to Review in the Departmental Transition to ITaaS and Hybrid IT Strategies
- Reinforce a need for change and instill a sense of urgency
- Get clarity on dependencies between elements of the IT organization
- Determine priorities and phases of transformation
- Determine training and development needs
- Quantify the cost and benefit areas
The elephant might say that there is no one-size-fits-all manner in which to approach ITaaS and Hybrid IT strategies. He would be right. Change like this is challenging. It has to be based on each organization’s specific makeup and business needs. But, the transition needs to happen. We can help you get started.
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