Businesses with significant technology investments can find themselves unable to take advantage of shifts in the market or respond to competitive pressures because the capital, people or coordination are not available in the urgency needed to react. Businesses are asking IT to provide the ability to increase business agility and speed and shift IT spend towards innovation from keeping-the-lights-on activities.
Cloud computing allows companies to continually adapt their technology needs to their business without the costs that would normally have to be considered with an onsite datacenter. Moving to the cloud saves the upfront cost of purchasing, managing and upgrading the IT systems. Using a Cloud model converts capital expenditure to operational expenditure. Using a one-time-payment, pay-as-you-go model, organizations can significantly lower their IT costs.
Benefits of Cloud IT-as-a-Service
The Cloud model offers IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) that can be more flexibly provisioned, metered and charged based on use. The fundamental beneï¬ts of the as-a-service model include:
• Access to up-to-date technology for businesses of all sizes, maintained by service providers that can leverage economies of scale
• Scalability without one-off payments of hardware and software enables growing enterprises to more easily expand existing computing resources according to business requirements while minimizing operational costs
• Fast implementation times for new applications and business processes
• Freeing up staff and resources for innovation projects and priorities
Transforming to a Cloud Operating Model
While the goal of Cloud IT transformation is to drive efficiency, agility and growth, businesses must drive adoption and consumption of ITaaS across the enterprise with a new IT operating model. A Cloud Operating Model is a framework which explains how an organization’s people, processes and technology come together to design, develop, deploy and run applications on cloud-based platforms. This framework enables IT to better understand the needs and expectations of the business and deliver the supply of internal and external services the business wants, faster. The focus of a cloud operating model includes adopting a new approach to IT operations that better aligns IT with the business and creates business value, which includes automating operations and organizing around service delivery.
2. Define and create automated service-focused IT processes. Implement the processes in an automation tool to streamline operations, automate approvals, improve service quality and enforce compliance policies.
3. Reorganize and structure the IT team around managing the cloud infrastructure and delivering all-inclusive, end-to-end services by defining the roles and skills needed to manage service delivery and the infrastructure. The team will need to adopt new roles and skills to support and align with the IT processes and infrastructure. A role is not a person. It is a set of responsibilities and activities. A single person can take on multiple roles. Existing IT staff can be leveraged for new roles because their responsibilities are freed up based on redefined, streamlined service delivery processes.
4. Create an online ITaaS service catalog with user-friendly taxonomy and navigation and automated provisioning to make it easy to find and consume services. The service catalog should have role-based access control, and the services should be clearly defined with service tiers, pricing and SLAs. Publish the service catalog in a self-service portal with automated approval routing and resource provisioning.
Key Cloud IT Service Management Processes
To support and maintain operations of both services and the infrastructure, the following set of key Cloud IT service management processes are needed for effectively implementing an ITaaS model.
• Service Portfolio Management - Define which services will be included in the service portfolio, and how those services are tracked and progressed through their lifecycle. Ensure that services are aligned with business strategy, developed according to business requirements, and delivered by the most appropriate provider.
• Service Catalog Management – Manage and maintain the service catalog of all operational services, as well as those being prepared to run operationally - transforming from a catalog of technical things to a catalog of user-focused consumable services. This includes service definition and the production and maintenance of an accurate service catalog.
• Service Asset and Configuration Management – Define and control the components of services and infrastructure. This information includes details of how the assets have been configured and the relationships between assets. It provides a logical model of the IT infrastructure, correlating IT services and different components needed to deliver the services, and ensures that assets under the control of the IT organization are identified, controlled and properly cared for throughout their lifecycle.
• Availability Management - Ensure that the level of service availability delivered in all services meets or exceeds the current and future needs of the business. Provide advice and guidance to the business and IT on all availability-related issues, ensure that service availability achievements meet all their targets by managing service and resource-related availability performance, assist with the diagnosis and resolution of availability related incidents and problems, and implement proactive measures to ensure the availability of services.
• Capacity Management - Ensure that the capacity of IT services and the IT infrastructure can deliver the agreed service levels for the current and future performance needs of the business in a cost-effective and timely manner.
• Change Management - Control the lifecycle of all changes, enabling beneficial changes to be made with minimum disruption of IT services. Respond to changing business requirements while maximizing value and reducing incidents, disruption and re-work. Respond to the business and IT requests for change that will align the services with the business needs.
• Request Fulfillment - Fulfill low-risk, low-cost, frequently-occurring service requests from end users and provide general information to end users about the availability of services and the procedure for obtaining them. Connect the integrated demand portal with the service catalog and the orchestration and provisioning functions that support it
• Event Management - Monitor and measure service performance by detecting any noticeable occurrence that has significant impact on the management of the IT Infrastructure or the delivery of IT services, make sense of them and determine the appropriate action to take for service assurance.
• Incident Management – Handle all incidents of loss or degradation of service reported by users, technical staff, or automatically detected and reported by event monitoring tools. Restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse impact on business operations, ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained.
Key Cloud IT Service Organization
If IT can’t provide what the business needs when it needs it, the business will look elsewhere. So, understanding the needs and expectations of the business, and delivering the right services faster, is crucial to avoiding shadow IT.
The Supply Center is a key element in Cloud IT transformation. The creation of a Supply Center organization requires a shift in approach to delivering technology services based on a supply-and-demand model. The Supply Center is responsible for overall service design, creation and operation of the service.
The Service Management Office (SMO) is responsible for the strategy and planning of IT services. The SMO leverages industry best practices and frameworks to deliver market-competitive services that add value. The SMO is responsible for partnering with the relationship management and service owners to obtain service requirements by connecting and aligning business strategy and technology strategy.
Service Governance brings together stakeholders to establish long-term direction and expectations for all IT Supply Centers at the service portfolio level. Service Governance resolves cross-organizational issues and supports major funding decisions that directly enable IT service delivery. Service Governance oversees the IT Operating Model and the people, processes and technologies required to sustain it.
Conclusion
Operating as a services-oriented, demand-centered business enables IT to better align with the enterprise, and to create, build and maintain business value. By having the right organization and processes in place companies can drive adoption and consumption across the enterprise to accelerate business outcomes. IT organizations will be able to improve communication and collaboration with the company and better understand business needs and expectations. By improving operational and cost efficiency, IT organizations will be able to anticipate business needs, proactively propose innovative solutions and deliver the services that the business really wants, faster.
