Economic recession, cloud computing and more drive IT organizations today to embrace agility and align IT operations tightly with business priorities.
Talk of IT working more closely with the business is reaching a fever pitch following economic downturns and hype around technologies such as cloud computing. CA Technologies recently hosted a panel discussion exploring the realities IT leaders face in 2010 and how using emerging technologies could help efforts to add agility and innovation to their organizations. Brian Bell, General Manager of the Service Portfolio Management Customer Solution Unit at CA Technologies, participated on the panel and recently shared his take on the event and what IT leaders are thinking now. (Read CA Clarity PPM Insights blog here.)
Want IT-business alignment? Evolve into an innovative, agile IT organization
The discussion around IT-business alignment is not new. Why is business-IT integration critical now?
Agile IT is relevant now because we went through this massive recession and the precipitous drop-off in IT budgets put immense pressure on IT to control costs. Now the industry is emerging from that and there is greater pressure and opportunity from the business side to focus more on revenue growth. That requires innovation. Coming from all the dimensions of the business, it has been technology that drives innovation more than anything. The premise of creating an IT organization that is agile, that can more quickly respond and align technology and resources as demand comes up, is resonating with IT leaders now more than ever.
What external factors are driving the need for IT to become more agile?
Constant acceleration of change drives the need to make things more agile. The market and technology drives it. Now we have more options to deliver services, whether it’s through the cloud or leveraging cloud infrastructure to be innovative, and again that is about being agile. We see the change in our own lives. We see the way in which a business can present a service or a product or modify it the next day to best meet the needs of the customer. We see the constant incremental improvements in how those services are designed. That’s how you get ahead and customers are beginning to demand this more.
Do IT leaders fear this move toward a more agile state of being, especially if it involves cloud computing?
One reaction is to be concerned or alarmed or to feel as though they are losing control. But the smart IT leaders are recognizing cloud computing as an opportunity. It could create a greater opportunity for IT leaders and allow them to take on other projects with existing resources. There is an opportunity to redefine the role of the CIO, in which the CIO no longer becomes the person to delivery business services to the business not just from the IT infrastructure and not just managing technology, but the CIO becomes the person managing the supply chain of services for the business.
How can IT leaders foster more alignment with the business?
First and foremost, IT leaders need to view their role as not managing technology but managing business initiatives and business services. If they think about managing technology versus delivering services they are going to approach that role differently. IT leaders have to have visibility into what are the levers they can control and what is the impact of each of those services. They also need to consider how the services support revenue growth and cost control. It becomes very similar to being an external service provider. External service providers win new customers when they are able to go in and win on the value they can provide with an attractive price point.
How do technologies such as cloud computing, agile development and social media related to a discussion around IT agility and innovation?
Cloud computing basically provides the computing capacity if you leverage it right. It offers you the computing power and capacity to take on things that perhaps you normally would not have done. It changes the dynamics and allows IT to ramp up and ramp down more quickly to meet changing needs.
Agile development is a methodology that has become more widely adopted and it enables an organization to more effectively and more quickly meet the needs of customers. It is not necessarily about developing products faster, but it does allow you to change the list of requirements and change the priority of what they are going to put in the releases on a more regular basis. Companies can decide, given where they are, what the next right thing is to include in a release. It is an iterative approach to the market.
And social media, which is a term I don’t like because it is really enterprise collaboration. The technology is more about connecting people with people and people with knowledge to drive productivity with the business. If you do that effectively, you can reuse ideas and drive faster innovation – which leads to agility.
Where are you at in your goal to become an agile organization? What factors are driving your IT department’s move to agility? Please leave a comment here or let me know your thoughts directly via e-mail at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.
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