By Gene Likins
Accelerate consultants are fortunate to work with a wide variety of IT organizations. Our clients vary by industry, global footprint, size, and competitive landscape. But one common theme among IT leaders has been that true IT transformation involves much more than just updating the technology. In fact, technology consistently ranks low for the challenges IT executives brace for as they push their organizations to modernize and shift toward ITaaS.
With ITaaS, the expectations and ground rules for IT are rapidly changing from “internal shared service” to “quality services at a competitive price.” As IT, our customers are no longer captive; they can easily work directly with public clouds and SaaS vendors. This conjures up a new meaning to “rogue IT.”
With any trend or shift in an industry, there are always those companies that lead through innovation and/or necessity. Based on our experience with these ITaaS leaders, here are a few recurring themes worth considering for your IT transformation.
- Set up a governance structure
This structure should empower service managers to prioritize and fund end-to-end services, rather than point projects. For example, an end-to-end IT service might focus on quarterly budgeting and planning. This is made up of infrastructure, ERP, BI, and dashboards. Strategically minimize IT point projects that are simply limited to deploying one particular technology or application. - Deploy services incrementally
Avoid the “big bang” approach to launching services—agility is the name of the game now. Two potential options are to quickly deploy a couple of simple services across a large number of businesses, thus maximizing the footprint of the impact. Another option is to focus many services on a single business unit to showcase deeper impact. Either way, the incremental approach will enable iterations, which will enable IT to monitor and refine the outcome. - Avoid wholesale org changes
First gain a sense for the services and service level agreements (SLAs) you will offer. Develop the IT operating model to deliver IaaS then ITaaS with a private cloud. Then use the operating model to gradually build a new organizational structure. There has been much discussion about cloud centers of excellence (COEs). One weakness I’ve observed with COEs has been accountability. An alternative may be to form a small greenfield team to start. This team could then generate some quick wins and slowly grow to eventually envelope the existing IT model over time. - Market IT services – Never forget, that as a services business, you must always market and promote your services. Put in the effort and invest in communication and marketing plans to ensure customers are seeing the value, and that you are advertising the successes right back to your customers. Being IT no longer gives you an excuse not to market yourself.
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Gene Likins leads the VMware Accelerate Advisory Services practice for North America and is based in Atlanta.
