In a classic Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”, Mr. Spock describes the 1930s technology he was forced to use to construct a computer as “stone knives and bearskins”. This is not far from the IT model businesses have been mired in for decades. Businesses could apply the best minds to solving IT challenges, but without the right service delivery model in place, they just ended up struggling.
Today’s massively compressed service delivery demands have left IT organizations in an impossible situation. Business users often have a small window of time to take advantage of new market opportunities, yet it can take up to a year to deliver a new service to make this possible. The lag time can be due to staffing challenges, delays in hardware delivery or the weeks of time needed to setup new systems. But regardless, it is not a sustainable model.
This put IT professionals in an unenviable position, which is evident in the number of people entering the profession. We’ve seen a real drop off in the number of students enrolling in computer sciences programs. That’s because they haven’t seen it as a compelling role. And who could blame them? No one wants a job rife with complaints because they simply can’t meet user needs.
Happily, we are now seeing IT organizations break free from these constraints. Clients consistently tell me their IT organizations are not the same as they were just a few years ago. That’s terrific news for IT professionals, who no longer act as a segmented part of the business. Technical and business professionals are now actively engaged together in defining, validating, delivering and measuring services. No longer is IT relegated to reactionary mode, awaiting unexpected demands and deadlines from across the business. There is shared accountability for service delivery.
And more importantly, IT is a real player in delivering services that yield additional business value. When I talk with CIOs, they’re more enthusiastic about the value they’re delivering today than I’ve seen in years. They’re really contributing to the success of their organizations.
The intelligent workload management (IWM) model makes this possible.
Instead of building resources ad-hoc upon request, IT teams can create reusable workloads in an on-demand fashion to deliver services. Once they’ve developed this library of workloads that can be easily plugged together like Legos, they can significantly reduce time-to-delivery from upwards of 12 months to as little as 15 minutes. And with the “library” built, IT is free to apply their knowledge to explore new ways to increase performance, reduce costs and drive innovation.
If businesses can transition into the context IWM permits, they can attract new talent, freed from the “stone knives and bearskins” of the old IT model. This radically changes the value, and the perception, of IT across the organization.
Are you seeing this shift in your organization? We’d love to hear about your successes.
Posted
Jul 12 2010, 09:37 AM
by
RossChevalier