By John Worthington
As with any operational transformation, an IT organization should start with a roadmap that lays out each step required to gain the capabilities needed to achieve their desired IT and business outcomes. A common roadblock to success is that organizations can overlook one or more of the following key elements of IT capability transformation:
Technical
Technical capabilities describe what a technology does. The rate of technological change can drive frantic cycles of change in technical capabilities, but often, it is critical to examine other transformation elements to realize the value of technical capabilities.
People
A people-oriented view of a capability focuses on an organization’s workforce, including indicators of an organization’s readiness for performing critical business activities, the likely results from these activities, and the benefit from investments in process improvement, technology and training.
Transitioning people requires understanding what roles, organizational structure and knowledge will be needed at each step along the transformation path.
Process
A process sharpens the view of an organizational capability. Formally calibrating process capabilities and maturity requires processes be defined in terms of purpose/objectives, inputs/outputs and process interfaces. One advantage of a process view is that it combines other transformation elements, including people (roles) and technology (support for the process).
Transitioning processes is more about adaptation – assuming the organization has defined processes to adapt. While new working methods associated with cloud computing—such as agile development and continual deployment—are driving ‘adaptive’ process techniques, an organization’s process capability will remain a fundamental and primary driver of organizational maturity.
Service
A service consciously abstracts the internal operations of a capability; its focus is on the overall value proposition. A service view of a capability is directly tied to value, since services—by definition, according to ITIL—are a “means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.”
As you assess your organization’s readiness for transformation, and create a roadmap specific to your organization, it’s essential that these transformation elements are understood and addressed.
John Worthington is a VMware transformation consultant and is based in New Jersey. Follow @jMarcusWorthy and@VMwareCloudOps on Twitter.
