Drop your organizational structure blinders when considering the future of IT
- Summary:
- Summary: Too often organizations think about their future with their feet firmly planted in the constraints of today. For an IT organization that will not work since many of the issues that constrain us today are going to be irrelevant in the future.
Over the past few months I’ve been in a number of discussions with IT leaders talking about cloud adoption. The one common point I find interesting is the fascination with the infrastructure involved.
In an age of Infrastructure as a Service, IT organizations need to understand that the realm of IT is vast, and expanding. The infrastructure we used to focus so much effort upon has been commoditized and automated to an an afterthought – an important thought but not one IT organizations need to focused nearly as many resources upon. IaaS is at the core of the future of IT organizations but strategically only a small part and it may be provided by someone else.
Think about it this way. Talk with young people today. They may use a tablet, laptop, PC or game console during various parts of the day. Each of these devices may be running a different operating system – and they just don’t care. It is just a tool for what they need to do at the time. Ask them about a Windows 10 upgrade and most will first ask if their current apps will still run and then shrug and then say “OK”.
This perspective will become more prevalent in IT organizations as well, not just in the end user customer base.
Infrastructure as a Service is now the domain of third party providers like AWS. Even Platform as a Service solutions are dominated by services like Azure. For software access more solutions are being provided by Software as a Service Providers like SalesForce and even SAP. Finally when organizations want to access IP, process and personnel they reach out to Business Process Outsources like ADP. This is nothing new. It is all pay by the drink and requires less and less traditional IT involvement. Granted the further out in this sphere you go the more locked in you become.
Organizations can’t take their eye off the ball of the larger shifts that are taking place and what they can mean to their business. The perspective of cloud shown above is only part of a larger perspective that consists of many clouds.
It includes the cloud of data sources that describe (through the data they produce) the environment of the enterprise. It also includes the cloud of ideas, automation and action -- that is where value is delivered. Each of these has its own set of concerns and possibilities.
In the discussions with IT leaders, it was clear that organizational boundaries were one of the first barriers that need to be overcome. It is about value to the business not if the work is done by IT, Engineering, Strategy or some other part of the organization.
The teams of people focused on the assembly, care and feeding of the infrastructure were almost irrelevant in the bigger discussion of what organizations really need to be competitive – yet they still felt they were in control. A larger view is required to get results otherwise they are going to be overcome by events and feel blindsided.
This simple but powerful macro level model only touches on the highest concepts that need to be addressed. Your organization may have other clouds of capabilities to consider, like the partners in its ecosystem or the security constraints it lives within.
I’ve blogged before about the shift in value that will take place in a world of abundant IT capabilities. That shift in value will require new measures and perspectives, since our current scarcity based models can easily hold back our thinking.
There will need to be a reassessment of the whole approach to goal setting, measurement and governance to really take advantage of the capabilities and address the needs of the business. The question you need to answer is what are you going to do about it and when?