|
A crush of competing “top priorities” has left today’s chief information officer (CIO) in a very difficult position—which continues to get worse. The board - room is demanding greater IT alignment with business goals and objectives. Users are increasingly frustrated about getting what they need from IT. IT staff are equally frustrated with systems and processes that don’t deliver. Then there are the expectations: Reduce complexity. Increase agility and flexibility. Be more respon - sive. Facilitate compliance. Spend more on innovation, and less on maintenance.
And while IT is doing all that, it should also cut costs. While these things certainly are good ideas—and absolutely necessary to the long-term health of the enterprise—they are out of the reach of most corporate IT departments. The major roadblock is the IT infrastructure itself. Organic growth, mergers, acquisitions, globalization, low hardware costs, and demands for cutting-edge consumer and business applications have caused a huge and haphazard expansion in the technology structure of most companies. The result is data centers filled with a complex and heterogeneous collection of hardware, applications and business services that are costly to support and almost impossible to manage.
Indeed, rising IT costs are not attributable to technology hardware itself. While the number of servers is doubling every five years, networks are doubling every two years, and storage is doubling every year,1 hardware costs remain generally flat. The real cost is in IT management and administration—which now consume the majority of data center spend. The rate of change and the complexity of the environment heighten the risk inherent in every move IT makes. Add all this to a proliferation of new applications, the evolution of infrastructure technologies (such as virtualization) and the pace of busi ness; it isn’t surprising that IT is finding it hard to keep up. As CIOs seek ways to increase business agility, addressing these spiraling management and administration costs is now critical. Small wonder, therefore, that data center transformation projects are near the top of most CIOs’ agendas. As with any major transformation project, the tightrope these CIOs must walk is to improve performance, reduce costs and increase agility without affecting service quality or compliance. “Tribes” and silos hamper IT agility.
IT must spend heavily on management and admini stra - tion because so much of it is done by people—even the best of whom are prone to errors and inconsistencies. In most cases, IT has a fragmented organizational structure based on the support of capabilities rather than the delivery of services. In this capability-centric environment, people align themselves into “tribes” or siloed groups, such as systems and network engineers, database administrators, IT help desk, monitoring cen - ters, application operations, and deep technical support teams, among others. Each tribe has its own culture, rituals and language designed to produce and manage their specific capabilities—and each is reluctant to communicate or share information with the others.
Processes are developed and implemented within each group, and are not coordinated across groups. In such a structure, IT management is not able to get a genuine big-picture view of its operation. Instead, it can get only a splintered ad-hoc view of the infrastruc - ture and the services it is providing to the business—a view seen through the lens of the various siloed groups themselves.
As a result, IT spends the vast majority of its time and resources focusing on components (clients, servers, applications, networks and storage) rather than the proper delivery of business services. Today, one dollar spent on hardware results in between three and four dollars of management spend, and 75 percent of all IT spend is on maintenance and support.2 Service level agreements (SLAs) are not being met. Eighty percent of downtime is caused by unplanned or poorly executed change, while 80 percent of mean time to repair (MTTR) is spent on trying to determine what has changed. Making the problem worse, data centers are out of compliance with established standards, government regulations, operating procedures and processes.
At the enterprise level, it is difficult for users or departments to engage with IT and get what they need. This creates the perception that IT is not delivering full value for money spent.
|
