The conversation IT has with the business must change this year and this is the year of transformation predicted back in 2003 by Nicholas Carr in his Harvard Business Review article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”.  The cloud, virtualization and the growing number of service providers with as-a-Service options are the catalyst that will force this transformation in market time during 2011.

If you have kept up with my news posts this week, I swear I was unable to find much news to comment and post on that did not have to do with the service providers and transformation.  My favorite post of all is the CIO article, “ITIL vs The Cloud:  Pick One”, REALLY?  You are kidding right?  This and another post, “Consider the Cloud a Solution, not a Problem” are exactly the headlines and mentality that will send IT jobs To the proverbial Cloud, just as Nicholas Carr predicted.

The way we manage technology and our processes today should not hold us in the past.  Amazon is doing it again.  Amazon changed the industry from bricks and mortar retail to online, almost overnight.  Transform or die, it happened and is happening again.  Amazon is offering infrastructure as-a-Service, purchasable on a credit card.  Now let’s start watching the leaders in each industry flip flop based upon those who embrace new technology, agile development AND have the foresight to service enable their workloads instead of dissing and complaining about what and how much monitoring Amazon should be responsible for.  IT is responsible for measuring and communicating service performance, instrument your workloads and inject them with the intelligence required to communicate service performance.  These will be the transformational leaders of tomorrow.

Communicating service performance is on IT, are you making the transformation?

Michele