AUTHOR: Kenny McBride
Has the elephant in the room just suddenly appeared, or has the IT world just procrastinated over the most important facet of virtualization and cloud computing? There appears to have been a forlorn hope that they could ignore the nagging inevitability, the necessary restructuring of IT organizations in this new virtual, services driven world.
Technology shifts are remaking the CIO career trajectory, and as a result their organizations will have to evolve to meet these new demands and expectations. The increasing reliance on IT across the enterprise has seen the CIO evolve from being a “function” leader, into a business strategy leader. Quotes like “We are more focused on business outcomes than technology,” from Martin Davis, head of the technology integration office at Wells Fargo will become the norm rather than exception. The CIO role is evolving, from one of support to corporate business strategist, especially in this new rapidly changing cloud computing services orientated environment.
If we are to get the most out of highly virtualized, cloud-ready environments we have to rethink and realign IT organizations.
Consider the typical organization of the data center, with a hardware department, a network department and a storage department. Internal customers can no longer insist upon separate equipment and management tools, the world of standardization is upon us, if we like it or not.
Many organizations operating physical data centers leverage ITSM or ITIL framework for best practices and have developed corresponding management and maintenance practices. With the ever-increasing virtualization footprint, automated processes such as vMotion move workloads and applications between hosts based on business rules requires firms to realign and reassess their organizational structures and convert the “siloed” specialist into the service delivery “generalist”.
The basic steps required:
- Crystalize the need for change and instill a sense of urgency
- Drive clarity of IT organizational dependencies
- Revise organizational measurements, expectations and success criteria to reflect this new virtualized environment
- Determine priorities and phases of transformation
- Determine training and development needs
- Quantify the cost and benefit areas
In this quest to realize ITaaS, businesses should measure their operational readiness capabilities, review key infrastructure processes that need to be revised to support virtualization and private cloud strategies. The procedural efficiencies realized by automated provisioning, monitoring and management releases staff from the drudgery of repetitive tasks and frees them up to aid the firm realize true business objectives.
There isn't a one-size-fits-all way to deal with this new reality. Add to that the fact that organizational overhauls are hard and time consuming, and it isn't surprising we've been slow to face up to the matter, but the elephant is losing patience.
