Where is IT today?

Understanding the role

of IT as innovator and
business partner

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In today’s fast-paced world, the role of every corporate function is evolving. Businesses must continuously
reinvent themselves, foregoing stability in favor of innovation and making transformation a part of normal
business. Even traditional industries are being disrupted by technology, and only the most progressive
organizations will thrive.

IT departments find themselves in a unique position during this evolution. On the one hand, they’re at the
forefront of change through the development function. They’re leveraging emerging technologies to deliver
innovation that couldn’t even be imagined as recently as a year or two ago. On the other hand, their
operations function is still largely focused on minimizing the impact of these technological disruptions on the
operating infrastructure of the business that thrives on stability and consistency.

How does IT manage this contradiction? And more importantly, how does it best contribute to the success of
the business it is part of? That’s something we’re going to look at over a series of three eBooks. But to start,
we have to make sure IT understands where it is today.

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Continuous evolution
is a business strategy
While technology is the enabler of the concept of continuous
evolution, the driver of the concept within a business must be
the organization’s internal strategy. A business must commit to
the concept of constantly innovating every element of how it
operates, seeking to regularly redefine its customer offerings and
its internal operations. But it must also recognize that innovation
must be throttled—that a commitment to all out speed will result
in the organization becoming unable to keep up with the pace
of change, damaging its ability to deliver and increasing risk.

The business strategy must seek an optimal level of evolution

that delights customers without jeopardizing the internal
operations of the business, moving as fast as possible while
still delivering consistently. In developing that strategy, one
must consider many different factors: the ability for people to
absorb change, the funds available to invest in innovation, the
demands of the customer base, and the ability of suppliers and
competitors. Yet, one of the biggest factors is the speed with
which the IT department can evolve.

IT leaders must understand the evolution vs. stability

contradiction that exists within their department and develop
solutions that shift the business towards faster evolution.
And they must do that in the context of business needs, not
technology needs.

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Focusing on operations
and support
To begin this journey, IT leaders must focus on their internal
operations and support functions. These are two areas of
the business that have received less attention in recent
years as all of the investment and focus has been on
development of new solutions and leveraging emerging
technologies. But these are the areas that will determine the
success of a continuous evolution strategy.

If IT is to help the business to evolve as fast as technology

allows (while still ensuring the business can continue without
being exposed to excessive operating risks, regulatory
exposure, etc.), it must build an IT infrastructure that is
focused on core business areas. That infrastructure must
use the most appropriate technology solutions for each
business function and strike the right balance between cost,
security, performance, scalability, and supportability. And
none of that can happen unless IT leadership understands
the current environment.

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That means IT leaders must develop a comprehensive picture of
their current operations and support areas that includes:

• Distribution of costs. Which platforms, solutions, and

infrastructure elements are the most expensive to operate?
How does that cost differ between money and effort?
What are the committed future costs in terms of contracts,
maintenance agreements, and upgrade paths? Understanding
where the costs are going and how easily those costs can
be addressed is critical to understanding how IT can support
evolution. Understanding the difference between dollar costs
and people costs helps understand which elements require the
most hands-on support vs. operate on a stable but potentially
expensive platform.

• Distribution of benefits. We think of IT operations as a cost

center, but this must address which business functions are
being supported by each platform, solution, and infrastructure
element. This must answer the question, “How is the
business better off because of this aspect of our technology?”
Understanding which aspects of IT support the core business
and which are outliers is crucial to developing an
evolution strategy.

• Exposure to risk. There are always areas of IT operations that

are more exposed to risk than others. Knowing where the
expiring (or expired) maintenance contracts are, understanding
where the obsolete programming languages and operating
systems are being used, knowing which solutions are
dependent on a single resource to support them, etc. can help
IT guide the business when determining priorities.

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 • Integrations and dependencies. Few technology platforms
exist in isolation today. The IT infrastructure is a vast network
of dependent and integrated solutions and understanding
those connections is critical to determining how best to evolve
the environment. But that understanding must extend beyond
the technology connections and consider also the business
integrations and dependencies—how the business is
leveraging the solutions. Only then can an evolution strategy
be optimally aligned with the business.

• Alignment with business strategy. Any technology leader knows

that solutions tend to be forgotten once they are implemented
and become stable. As the business moves on, there are
“islands” of abandoned technology that still remain operating
within the business and consume resources. Understanding
which elements of the IT landscape are core to the current
priorities and future direction of the business and which
are more peripheral will help to devise a strategy that is most
supportive to the business needs.

Many IT leaders will claim they already have access to this

information, but that’s not the case. They’ll have metrics for costs,
incidents, resolution times, etc. for their core applications. But
there will be many outliers where the available information is
incomplete. Even where they do have metrics, there is often not
an understanding of what those metrics mean in terms of business
impact.

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For example, an IT department will know from its service
management tool which applications experience the most
outages, which tickets take the longest to resolve, etc. They
may even be able to look at trends to understand whether
those measures are improving or not. But how many IT leaders
understand the implication of those statistics? What is the cost to
the business in terms of revenue, customer satisfaction, regulatory
exposure, etc.? This is the kind of information IT leaders need if
they are to develop a continuous evolution strategy for IT that is
optimally supportive of the business.

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Understanding
the picture
Building a picture of what is happening within IT operations is
critical. If you don’t know where you are, you can’t develop a
plan to help the IT function and, more importantly, the business
evolve to where they need to be. Yet, building the picture through
those different elements is only the first step. Then you have to
understand what that means.

As an example, consider a software application that’s running on

an obsolete operating system that sits on a single physical server
in a remote corner of a physical server room. The application was
written by someone who left the business years ago, and the
documentation is rudimentary at best. There is one member of
your team who deals with any issues that arise, but that person
only solves things through trial and error. This should be a prime
candidate to be modernized, right?

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Well, maybe. All of the factors that tell you this software needs
to be addressed are IT aspects. What about the business
perspective of the software? Say you only need the application
for a process that runs once a quarter, that isn’t time sensitive,
and doesn’t expose your business to any risks or costs. To best
support continuous evolution of the business, you may be better off
ignoring that outlier and diverting effort and investment dollars to
an area of the technology infrastructure that appears to be more
sustainable but where the potential for improvements in business
performance are greater. Or maybe not—you can’t know without
developing an understanding of the environment you’ve assessed.

That’s why it’s so important to understand the business impact of

each of your IT operations and support metrics. Traditional IT is an
internally focused function. It operates against technology metrics
that have been established as proxies for business performance
without any validation that they are appropriate. It’s assumed
that minimizing time to resolution of a ticket is important, and it’s
assumed that minimizing outages is important. Those things are
important, but they’re relatively more or less important to some
business areas at some times in the business cycle and for some
applications. And that’s what IT is often missing.

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Expanding focus
Over the course of the two remaining ebooks in this series, we’ll
look at how IT departments can prepare their departments
to transform. Then, we’ll consider the transformation process.
But transformation can’t happen unless the IT department first
understands its role. In recent years, there has been increased
understanding that organizations must evolve and transform much
faster than has traditionally been the case. IT has established
itself as a partner to the business in that evolution through the
development of innovative software solutions that take advantage
of emerging technologies.

Those innovative solutions remain important. But on their own, they

cannot support continuous business evolution. IT must now expand
its focus beyond software development to include operations
and support. It must find ways to innovate those areas to deliver
the same kind of business transformation that has been achieved
through software development. That will require a whole new way
of looking at IT operations. It will require a new set of approaches,
relationships, and management techniques. It will redefine the way
IT is viewed by the business and will change what IT operations
means forever.

But none of that can happen unless and until IT understands

where it is today—what its operations and support environment
looks like and what that means in the context of the business that
technology infrastructure supports.

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 What’s next?
Change is inevitable, and it’s up to you to respond to that change to deliver maximum value to
the business. Making the move to consolidate and migrate off legacy IT tools lets you:

• Deliver IT services with greater speed, consistency, and accuracy

• Deliver a consumer-like experience that’s integrated with backend service delivery
• Support digital transformation and drive business growth

Start your business agility journey.

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