The Complete ITaaS Delivery Model™ - Revised Edition

THE COMPLETE ITaaS DELIVERY MODEL™

THE ART OF INTEGRATING AWS, DEVOPS AND ITIL INTO ITaaS DELIVERY MODELS

PHILIPPE A. ABDOULAYE

REVISED EDITION

The Future of IT Series

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Courtney ITaaS Series was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed using initial caps.

The author and publisher have taken care in the preparation of this book, but make no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of the use of the information contained herein.

Copyright © 2016 by Philippe A. Abdoulaye

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2016

ISBN: 978-1-365-10051-2

ITaaS Now LLC

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FOREWORD

There has never, ever, been a more fascinating time to be an IT leader.

It’s not just because of the abundance of incredible technology now swirling around us these days, though it does add a sense of awe and wonderment to any IT job.

The real fascination – and, I might add, career-enhancing potential – comes from the fact that technology has become a sought-after font of business opportunities. For starters, there are startups springing up every day that run their entire businesses on the cloud, connecting with potential customers via apps or websites, and employing data as intelligent competitive differentiators. But the fun isn’t just limited to those people involved in startups. Every organization these days, whether in the business of manufacturing furniture or producing films, is a technology organization.

Technology now plays the leading role in every new business initiative. Organizations are competing on analytics, converting data into insights that will drive new decisions. New products either have digital components or are entirely digital. Employees are accessing systems and services through mobile devices that allow for anywhere, anytime computing. Marketing is now about social engagements that occur before, during and after sales.

There are many technology options for today’s organizations. They don’t have to rely entirely on their IT departments, and can turn to cloud-borne services from outside providers.

This doesn’t pose a competitive threat to existing IT departments, however. If anything, it redefines their roles and operating methods. Technology people are no longer confined to the server room, generating reports and supporting desktops, but are being called upon to open up new vistas for their businesses. IT organizations need to operate in a more competitive mode, adopting customer-centric approaches and managing margins. 

In the pages in front of you, Philippe describes the ways IT executives, managers and professionals can evolve their departments, their jobs, and their careers, through an IT as a Service, or ITaaS philosophy and methodology.

ITaaS represents a new way of thinking for IT managers. First, it elevates their roles, from that of coding, integration and maintenance to that of consultant, trusted advisor, or even as equal to their peers in the business executive suites or boardrooms. Second, it positions IT as a service provider on the order of a commercial service (think of your own private Amazon Web Services), with the same ease of access and customer-driven accountability. Third, it opens up new possibilities for businesses to extend the services they develop and offer to a broader market, be it existing customers or new ones.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that ITaaS is about serving customers – be they internal within various departments, or external to the business. As Philippe so astutely points out in this book, implementing IT services is not only about deploying software solutions, it’s about meeting the customer’s needs with responsive, quality services. As IT leaders and professionals get comfortable with this point of view, they will find themselves ascending the leadership ranks of their organizations.

Joe McKendrick

ZDNet and Forbes IT Industry Analyst

PREFACE

Let's do IT transformation as we should, we will make businesses happy with their cloud platform.

Background

IT Vendors, Consulting Firms, and CIOs, Trapped In Soliloquies Have Been Struggling to Offer Their Lines of Business A Paradigm Other than Cost Reduction and Fast Time-to-Market

As businesses around the globe seek desperately to transform their business models and get them focused on increasing customer value, they need to rely on IT organizations, systems and infrastructure that are specifically thought to deliver the tangible business benefits they expect.

Last year to support IT practitioners help businesses achieve pure business benefits with the cloud I introduced in my book, Cloud Computing: Advanced Business and IT Strategies to Extract Tangible Value, the foundations of how businesses can adjust their IT operating model to take advantage of the cloud and derive pure business benefits.

As I observed it on the ground, caught up in the merry-go-round of the promises of cloud computing and the massive IT innovations, IT vendors and CIOs seem to have forgotten that pure business benefit is what matters.

In fact, through massive marketing campaigns and buzzwords the major brands of the IT industry without exception have been preaching the benefits of their innovative cloud solutions supposed to bring massive benefits.

They aren’t realizing that the Cheap and Quick IT Paradigm that’s been around for decades has been shot down by cloud computing; responsiveness to unpredicted and unpredictable market opportunities and  tangible organizational agility supporting profitable innovation cultures are the competitive advantages businesses have been desperately seeking.

Today’s Cloud Implementation Approaches Are Totally Disconnected From the Fundamental Expectations of Lines of Business

From my discussions with several business folks from various industries, I understand that they’re aware of the cloud benefits but what they desperately and primarily expect from their IT department is a greater focus on critical business needs and priorities. In other words, their question is straight, "Where are the pure business benefits of your cloud solutions? We don’t see them!"

Patrick Phillips, a remarkable operational efficiency expert, substantiates my point in a remarkable article that I recommend  "IT Must Adapt or Die: This Story Brought to You by the Third Providers Trying to Make You Irrelevant (…) when he says Less than 25% of business leaders rated their organization’s IT function effective at delivering the capabilities they needed. Today the number hasn’t changed. IT functions have strived tirelessly to understand demand, set priorities, deliver effectively, and capture value, yet the results still disappoint."

Cloud and ITaaS practitioners must constantly make sure they understand the fundamental needs and expectations of business lines and that they do not confuse them with the massive hypes surrounding cloud and ITaaS.

Do IT Vendors and Cloud Consultants Really Understand the Business Whys and Wherefores of ITaaS? The Question is Worth Raising

The general feeling is, encouraged by their IT providers and consulting firms, CIOs tend to sell their lines of business the idea that cloud and ITaaS are the miraculous solutions to their competitive issues.

They’re right, shifting to cloud and in general to ITaaS is the way to go. But a close look at what they mean by Cloud Migration and ITaaS Transformation shows the surprising fact that they don’t understand the whys and wherefores of ITaaS and most importantly, it clearly demonstrates a severe disconnect between business line expectations and the cloud vendors’ vision and approach.

What is striking, funny and deserves to be mentioned is the IT industry’s response to the business line expectations; while a greater focus on critical business needs and priorities is expected, highly sophisticated cloud solutions are recommended as if virtualization, automation, resource pooling and elasticity will miraculously result in effective selection and prioritization of critical business needs, in a greater focus of IT on business priorities, and in greater business benefits.

Michael B. Head of a line of business at Credit Suisse in New York had that wonderful remark, "The benefits to be generated by your so-called innovative software represent less than 3% of what we gain from increasing our existing customers’ value through basic techniques like cross-selling …" Point blank. Certain CIOs and cloud vendors should seriously meditate that remark.

The ITaaS Paradigm is the Perfect Answer to Business Line Expectations But IT Vendors Narrow It to Their Cloud Solutions and Infrastructure

The good news for CIOs and business lines is, the ITaaS concept provides all the mechanisms to get them agree and focus on the critical business needs and priorities but the bad one is, cloud vendors and consulting firms either do not understand what ITaaS is or mis-sell their ITaaS consulting services and solutions.

Wikipedia gives the best definition of what ITaaS is "IT as a service (ITaaS) is an operational model where the IT organization of an enterprise is run much like business, acting and operating as a distinct business entity creating Products (including services) for the other Line of Business (LOB) organizations within the enterprise. At its core, ITaaS is a competitive business model where an enterprise IT organization views the LOBs as having many options for IT services and the IT organization has to compete against those other options in order to be the provider to the needs of the LOBs. (…)"

In other words, migrating to ITaaS is a complex and authentic IT organization transformation effort whose objective is to aggregate business and IT practices into a common platform of people, processes, best practices, and cloud services specifically thought to deliver critical business needs and priorities in a cost-effective and timely manner. Cloud vendors and consulting firms does not understand ITaaS transformation that way; they erroneously (or purposely) think that ITaaS transformation is primarily a matter of technology change. You have here the reason why increasingly businesses get frustrated with their cloud capabilities.

Without An Authentic IT Organizational Transformation Approach That Addresses the IT Operation Model, IT Services, and Technology Dimensions of IT, No Business Benefits Can Be Expected from ITaaS

The definition of ITaaS mentioned above points out the key notions needed to implement comprehensive ITaaS capabilities that keep IT focused on delivering critical business needs and priorities; these notions include IT Service, Operating Model, and Competitive Business Model. The fact of the matter is, these notions are misunderstood in the IT world, they’ve been diverted from their very meaning, they are part of the IT marketing lexicon and are primarily used to facilitate the sales of expensive software and infrastructure businesses do not necessarily need.

Let’s take the notion of IT service which is mistakenly confused with the modules of ITSM software (e.g., BMC ITSM); how many of these Big Four understand and tell CIOs that IT services like any basic service assumes a Consumer of the service and a Provider of the service and that creating IT agility is primarily about implementing Consumer-Provider Relationships across the organization such that both parties focused on their core competency. This is what creating IT agility is about.

All these authentic IT transformation practices are overlooked and ignored for several reasons ranging from the lack of authentic IT transformation qualifications and background  to the decline of consulting practices where the trend is to tell clients what they want to hear and not what they must hear, Jason Bloomberg substantiates that fact  in a bombshell, "Beware the Dangers of Bimodal IT where he argues that The brilliant minds at Gartner – and any other consultant towing the Bimodal IT line, for that matter – are telling their clients what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. Bimodal IT is simply an excuse to keep doing IT poorly."

Why This Book Was Written, and For Whom?

This book offers to the cloud practitioners and to the cloud industry in general The Cloud Transformation Methodology referred to as Courtney ITaaS or simply Courtney in the rest of the book. It’s an approach to implementing ITaaS Delivery Models that addresses not only cloud solutions and infrastructure but also the transformation of IT the operating model as well as the deployment of relevant cloud services.

This book was written in response to the need for practical cloud implementation approaches that stress business benefits. It presents the Courtney methodology and its Complete ITaaS Delivery Model . It spans the key areas of Cloud Strategy, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Architecting and Implementation, DevOps and Chef Architecting and Implementation, and ITIL and Agile Scrum Implementation in the cloud context and put them together into sets of coherent concepts that facilitate IT organizations migration to ITaaS Delivery Models.

Although this book addresses in details technical issues as important as AWS platform architecture design and implementation,  AWS architecture patterns, chef-based infrastructure