One of the great struggles in today’s enterprises is the ongoing shift of influence from the CIO community into other stakeholder groups. I’ve blogged about this before. An important aspect of this influence shift is the fact that IT has increasingly become unaligned with business goals. But the pendulum is now swinging back. The mechanism the pendulum is using is the as-a-service offer set.
During the recession, companies focused on cost reduction and operational excellence, and IT increasingly lost touch with the business. Purchasing departments focused relentlessly on driving up unit costs and countless operational process improvement vehicles to further lean out organizations. As a result, IT organizations became more efficient — but also less aligned with business needs.
Business users reacted by demanding greater focus on business outcomes and began taking things into their own hands and purchasing as-a-service offerings.
The as-a-service path is a reorganization
One of the benefits of the as-a-service model is that it creates a seamless linkage between business functionality and delivery. And it cuts through layered IT organizations, reorganizing according to business functionality.
The benefits that an organization extracts once it goes down this path is tight alignment by business functionality — close to functionality on demand — and far more flexibility. It enables focusing on the business impact of technology. Businesses can move more quickly and flexibly to adopt the functionality and also scale their consumption to usage.
The implications for IT are enormous in that it requires a rethinking of the classic IT functional organization, which has been in place for the last 15 years. It requires a reconceptualization of the following aspects:
- How IT is organized
- How assets, services and software are procured
- How IT is measured and managed
The benefits of the functionality and scaled consumption to usage are extremely powerful and can only continue to reshape how IT is delivered. But the reconceptualization of IT is far from trivial. It is not just a new pose for IT. The as-a-service model fundamentally reshapes the IT philosophy on how it’s organized, procured, measured and managed.
