As Logicalis U.S. CEO Vince DeLuca recently wrote in Corp!, the balance of power for technology direction and spending continues to shift away from IT and towards line-of-business divisions. CIOs and other IT leaders are thus left wondering what the future may look like.
To take on the future, IT leaders should focus on managing a portfolio of IT services rather than individual technologies and traditional roles. Future IT leaders must also surrender the idea of control as the role of IT within the enterprise. That does not mean embracing chaos however. It means adopting a different and more proactive stance that is more business responsive.
IT organizations need to present a menu of technology choices and experiences for their line-of-business users. That means adopting an operational model that provides strategy and guidance. This new model includes line-of-business divisions generating demand while IT employs the capabilities at its disposal to manage and provision the technology environment through a defined structure.
This model includes things like the service defined enterprise—with a focus on providing access to consumption-led cloud services that qualify and meet the organization’s needs. The model also includes taking advantage of available public structures and services such as software-as-a-service for enterprise applications like email, CRM and marketing platforms.
Resources will still need to be provisioned, but with more speed. Systems will need to be monitored, but with proactive steps to maintain user experiences. Software and hardware needs to be purchased and deployed—but with an eye toward consumerization of IT trends.
The future thus depends on IT leaders who can provide strategy for IT selection and consumption. They must also provide guidance on selection, integration and management criteria and usage policies while and striking a balance between the chaos and the calm.
For more information on deploying a service defined model, check out the Logicalis brief, 5 Things to Know About the Service-Defined Enterprise.