The Hub Commentary_

I came across this piece by my friend Dennis this week and thought how appropriate in reflection of the many articles I read, post and blog about regarding the tremendous change under foot for IT organizations this coming year.  IT is facing competition from the multitude of cloud based service providers who are selling services directly to the businesses because they can communicate a service, cost and value and they make it extremely easy and attractive to purchase.  IT must make this change in communicating their services if they plan to remain strategic within their organization.

The other facet to this article that pops out to me as I recently experienced this in my own daily working is that of the software or technology being the problem.  In my case it was software being blamed for not working and being told this is how the software works.  I am the customer wanting information out of a system to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.  I don’t care how the software work even though I work for a software company, I could care less if the system runs on a mainframe and is written in FORTRAN.  I want visibility of the data passing through the system without getting caught up in how the software works.  I also stated it isn’t that the software doesn’t work, it’s the implementation – garbage in, garbage out.  In this case, it is an incinerator and nothing comes out.

The business doesn’t care how many monitoring tools, networks, boxes, applications it takes to process transactions.  They want to visibility to the performance of their services requiring IT to implement end-to-end management views or business service management views.  This requires a top down approach in looking at your infrastructure and what makes up the service, requiring integration of data, transforming it into meaningful information by which to run the business.

All of this will require change for a change averse culture.  This will be a tough year for many IT professionals as Dennis points out.  They will need to:

• Learn to communicate
• Communicate in terms of service versus technology
• Embrace new technology deployment options
• Be catalyst for flexibility and agility
• Can do change agents
• Seek tools that enable, automate and help them

How ready is your IT to be the agent of change?

Michele

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EMA consulting once did an analysis of why strategic service management initiatives fail.  These ranged from cross-domain performance management initiatives, to configuration management initiatives with CMDB/CMS enabling foundations,  to company-wide asset management initiatives to name a few.    Of the top ten reasons for failure, only the bottom two (Integration and Discovery) were technology-related.  (Read Full Article…)