IT the Comeback Kid
Are you old enough to remember the mainframe days of IT, when humans had to climb onto machines to service them? Or the days of early programming languages such as Pascal or COBOL that had no correlation to any language spoken on planet Earth?

Certainly advances through the years have brought about major improvements, and like most of the major IT progression these have come in large cycles. The opportunities presented by such advances are always put to good use, but despite the potential in the world of enterprise IT, the internal IT organisation has suffered as a corporate services department. It has never really been able to offer the efficiency and effectiveness so desired by its business partners. With the lines of business moving up to three times faster than the average IT function, it is not unusual to assume that over time, business demand will be difficult to manage, efficiency difficult to contain and the customer experience will erode over time. Inevitably, when service slows down and complexity increases the business will question value. Moreover, the business is now demanding that IT do more with less - less what? Less money...Because of the lack of perceived value in IT by its business partners, the lines of business focus even more on cost transparency and on measuring this rigorously. All this combines to offer a tricky situation: there is a dramatic rise IT complexity, presenting a large problem for the CIO.

So why is complexity on the rise? Firstly, the emergence of the electronic age, faster technology and processing power has enabled the lines of business to move even faster in their execution of day-to-day operations. Secondly, and importantly, the internal IT organisation has continued to 'layer' solutions both from a data centre (hardware), network (infrastructure), software and people perspective. In order to get to the efficiency trapped inside the layers of complexity, today's CIOs have to look to re-engineering or restructuring in large IT organisations. In addition, the word 'management' in enterprise IT terms is still an early term - processes have evolved considerably, but they are finally moving to a maturity where effective solutions can sustain themselves in IT. Finally, the CIO's tenure is reducing all the time, and this is primarily due to not managing the basic problems in IT - i.e. deliver services on time, managing business capacity, providing a good customer experience, optimising costs and financial planning. This seems overwhelming until we realise the truth: that IT's problems have always remained the same! It is the complexity that has increased.

The IT organisation and its prevailing market players such as vendors and suppliers are getting smarter with this evolution of managing problems in IT. Whereas managing IT demand in large IT organisations remained elusive until now, we are seeing siloed management approaches become integrated to form the next set of solutions for the management of the IT function. For example, an IT organisation can now collect and understand its inventory (such as hardware and software assets), bring all the IT 'parts' - what is called a 'bill of materials' - and create bundled IT Services. These Services are pragmatic and easily understood by the line of business (the consumer). This enables a service level and price to be attached to the IT Service so that now IT and the line of business can partner to plan and track demand. Yesterday, this was not only difficult, it took the combination of three management disciplines to achieve. Today, we stand on the edge of a maturing evolution: 'IT Management'.

The next big IT wave - the re-emergence of IT Management

So what, you've read 1,000 words, and you're saying, “Wait - hasn't IT Management been around before?” The short answer is “Yes.” The long answer is that IT Management is not a new market, but a consolidating market driven by the vendor corporations such as CA, HP, and IBM, companies that started a wave of mergers and acquisitions already amounting to over $9Bn in consolidation purchases. What makes this new market special is that we are now seeing some fundamental drivers converge - namely, the need for smarter processes to solve underlying old or existing IT problems, innovative IT softwareintegrated to deliver support to the solutions of these problems, and an era of great expectation on the CIO - who must run IT more like 'the business.' The CIO is now tasked with not just managing through-put, but delivering innovation, greater efficiencies, services on time and much more in the execution of managing the business of IT.

As we near the endgame for the IT enterprise, we are seeing everyone from analysts to vendors to consultants think about how they can capitalise on this consolidating market. We also now have ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library - a set of best practices initiated by the UK government; or more importantly, serving as a simple language that explains the IT Enterprise). Managing IT is a big market, and the customer will see even more innovation in an attempt to make this easier over the next decade.

ERP for IT - it will affect the next 5 years of IT enterprise spend

Most corporate functions have in some way benefited from the ERP era, and still do today in a commoditised market. So why does IT not have an ERP system? The answer is simple; it hasn't evolved enough yet. But now, in its effort to escape from commoditisation, and in contrast to gain differentiation, the enterprise vendor community continues to consolidate small enterprise IT vendors who focus on the management of IT. Technology vendors such as CA, HP, IBM and others, are gaining ground on positioning an optimal customer value picture, yet have some way to go in grappling with the underlying problems CIO's are trying to solve. Vendors do understand the potential value of one data model, greater integration and cheaper, yet more effective technology - and this will have a dramatic affect on Enterprise IT. The market will soon have fewer 'Gorillas' and irrelevant 'Chimps' as the large enterprise software market players consolidate to deliver the ERP for IT - and this will usher in the modern IT Management market. Customers can expect cheaper technologies, more complete solutions and fewer vendors to deal with - never again will Enterprise IT be the same.

Just as we did during the first ERP wave, we can expect to see skill-sets evolve, standardise and align with the integrated ERP for IT systems - suppliers and vendors will have to work closely together to ensure the complete solution evolves and delivers on the full potential promised by integration, price standardisation and technical delivery. The impact of this change will make managing IT a lot easier moving forward. But some key challenges remain that CIOs must face to stay ahead of the IT Management curve:

1.Portfolio management will become even more key as organisations recognise the benefits of solid project/ programme transparency, better resource planning, making the best investment choices, and effectively modelling change across the business.

2.As the business accelerates, managing business demand continues to impact IT organisations' ability to stay agile. Grappling with this effectively will be a key to maintaining a consistent flow of successful projects through the arteries of IT.

3.Financial management must be tackled to provide a more transparent IT organisation -one that is accountable for recovery of IT costs yet is still pragmatic and equitable in its allocation to the business units.

4.Application-relevant information continues to be a meaningful way to view IT performance by the business, and it will be imperative to stay on top of these capabilities. Technology exists to discover, map, track and measure application performance.

5.Reaching beyond the perimeter of IT Security is now a core consideration as security threats are likely to come from within the organisation. Threats inside the perimeter include personal theft, IP and brand loss and much more - this is now a huge consideration for CIOs.

IT - The Comeback Kid... (Conclusion)

IT in the Enterprise has for some time experienced continuous erosion as the business reconciles perceived and real value. But IT is on the comeback trail. With evolving new management processes enabled by greater integration across IT management technologies, the business will start to see a new IT function - an IT function that will be able to execute with greater agility, more transparency and in better partnership with the business. Once again, the enterprise will see IT as the Comeback Kid.