Posts tagged ‘Business IT Alignment’
Cloud Requires a New IT Employee (Hint: MBA May Be Required)
We've come a long way since the IBM 3270. Or have we?
By Russell Rothstein
December 6, 2010
In today’s economy with sluggish job creation, there’s much talk about the change in skills required in today’s workforce. Drill down into the world of IT operations management, and there is an even greater shift happening, related not to the economy, but to cloud computing. The rapid adoption of private cloud architectures is creating ripple effects, not only on the way IT delivers services to its customers, but also on the types of skills IT requires to support these new architectures.
Cloud computing is heralding the most significant shift in IT skill sets since we displaced the armies of punch card operators with the IBM 3270. Cloud is a realization of utility computing, where whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand. As Gartner says in a recent report, private cloud services “will require a cultural and political change inside of IT to see the role of operations move to being more proactive — requiring predefined policies, service levels and automated actions to take on the runtime environment, as opposed to the manual initiation of scripts or workflows. This requires very different skills over time — a shift away from rote work toward more planning, service analysis and a better understanding of service users in order to continually improve how the service is ultimately delivered.” (Source: Gartner “Key Considerations in the Development of a Private Cloud Architecture”, August 23, 2010).
The key phrase used by Gartner is that IT personnel will require “a better understanding of service users”, which means a better understanding the business which is what’s driving the users to consume those IT services. In essence, cloud will necessitate IT to be more business focused. We have been talking about Business/IT alignment for too long now without sufficient progress; with the emergence of cloud models, this is no longer a choice – either IT upgrades to a business-centric service delivery function, or is ultimately to be replaced by outsourced cloud service providers that can provide utility computing services with greater cost efficiencies. That’s why Business Transaction Management, or BTM, must be at the center of your cloud management capabilities, in order to effectively plan for and manage cloud services from a business perspective. In an upcoming blog post, we’ll get the opinions from CIOs in the industry to understand their plans to address this rapidly changing environment.
To close up, it’s interesting to understand the new roles in IT that Gartner sees as emerging in order to support the delivery of new private cloud services:
- Cloud service architect (new role): Designs and documents the end-to-end cloud platform
- Portal developer: Develops interfaces that cloud consumers use to requisition services
- Workflow specialist: Defines requirements for instantiating automated processes
- Configuration management specialist: Develops consistent packaging and policy-conflict-free service deployment methods
We trust you are already filling these roles in your IT organization. And while these may not be the best the job in the world, but they most certainly beat a career as a roustabout.
December 6, 2010 at 3:14 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
Business-IT Alignment: When the Saints Come Marching In?
By Russell Rothstein
February 8, 2010
We are delighted for the residents of greater New Orleans who deserve a celebration after their Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts last night in Super Bowl XLIV. The people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region, still recovering from Katrina, have been waiting to take home a Vince Lombardi trophy for the first time since the Saints began to play in 1967.
And while it took the Saints forty-three years to achieve their goals of success, back here in the IT industry it has taken about that long to achieve our version of a Super Bowl win – true business-IT alignment.
There is a lot of talk in the industry about the importance of “aligning IT to business”, “managing IT based on business priorities”, and “monitoring IT infrastructure performance from a business perspective”. The concept of aligning IT with the goals of the business is not new – we’ve been talking about it ever since the first time a computer was used for a business application (by a food manufacturer in the UK!) back in 1950.
Yet, the vendor community has not been able to enable CIOs to meet their goals of B/I alignment. A key factor is that application teams, the folks in IT that liaise with the business and are in the best position to align with their LOB counterparts, are still using infrastructure-based tools to monitor and manage their environment. However, transactions are where IT and the business meet, and only with a transaction-based management approach can IT start to manage services from the business perspective. Business transaction management enables application teams to manage their environment, for the first time, from the perspective of business transactions, rather than from infrastructure metrics. (Many of you will recognize these as the still-unrealized goals of BSM – business service management; see a recent Forrester report on how BTM delivers on the promise of BSM.)
BTM answers the following questions to support B/I alignment:
- Resources: How will moving to the cloud help reduce customer churn or improve employee productivity? What is the business impact of a consolidation project? How will adding new servers or VMs change service levels?
- Process: What is the IT cost per business transaction? Is investment in new infrastructure going towards the most business-critical services? Is business impact factored into decisions for change management and release management?
- Language: Does the LOB care about the performance of silo metrics (e.g. JVM, database) or do they care about the performance of a business transaction — for example, what is the time for a submit order transaction, how long the transaction took to verify the credit card, authorize the user, check inventory, etc., and what will the performance look like when transactions increase by 100%?
Without BTM, you lack the transaction-centric information to answer these questions and are left about as helpless as defending against a Peyton Manning pass. And while the Saints achieved success with 340-pound linemen on their side, all you need is to make the move to BTM.
The Top Ten List of the Decade We Didn’t See on the Net
By Russell Rothstein
January 4, 2010
During the final week of our still-nameless decade (if it won’t be called “the zeros” or “the double-naughts”, we’ll vote for the “pre-teens” or the “naughties”) we spent too much time perusing through a plethora of Top 10listsofthedecade. And while we found much to learn from the fact that the top athlete of the decade is off the endorsement circuit thanks to a poorly placed fire hydrant, our attention was piqued by the selection for the top business application of the decade by CIO magazine senior editor Thomas Wailgum.
As a company that is focused on assuring the performance and availability of business applications, we spend a lot of time thinking about the critical applications that drive business for our customers. So we were intrigued to read that the top business application of the decade was not SAP, not salesforce.com, and not event something bought by Oracle. The winner for business application of the decade was Microsoft Excel. This came to us as an epiphany a few days early this year as Wailgum nailed it on the head by identifying that Excel delivers value in every nook and cranny of an organization. The ongoing success of the application is due not only to its feature set but also to its high availability and performance (as long as your PC is working fine ). As more and more applications, including business productivity applications, get served in the cloud, availability and performance become a greater IT challenge.
What’s even more significant to us is that Excel is one of the few applications that is used on a regular basis to share information (e.g. metrics, KPIs, costs) between IT and the business and enable collaboration between these two groups. Which brings us to the Top 10 list of the decade that we didn’t come across. If we had found a list of the decade’s top unfulfilled strategic IT initiatives, near the top would surely be Business/IT alignment. In fact, alignment with business goals has been at the top of the CIO’s New Year’s resolution list since well before the third millennium began.
Ever since Henderson and Venkatraman’s seminal article in the 1970’s, B/I alignment has been recognized as the holy grail in the IT management industry. We here at OpTier believe that our new decade (“the tens?”, “the teens?”, “the aughts?”) will see huge progress in this area thanks to business transaction management. OpTier pioneered BTM back in 2004 and in the past year we have seen IT managers and industry analysts acknowledge the central role that BTM plays in enabling management of services from a business perspective. At the start of this new year, we are well positioned to extend our technological and market share leadership in the BTM market, and we are committed to enable enterprises in the coming decade to fully align IT with their overall business goals.
Happy 2010!
January 4, 2010 at 8:11 am Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
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