Service-oriented organizations (SOOs) have been around forever. IT executives who have worked at traditional enterprises more than a decade or so have almost certainly taken a portfolio approach to managing IT, developed service catalogs, implemented the IT infrastructure Library (ITIL) to help achieve true IT Service Management (ITSM), and held value-based conversations with the business. The goal of all these changes was to run IT like a business.
So what could possibly be new and exciting about the age-old concept of SOOs? Let's take a look.
1. Value is your only currency.
The new SOOs recognize that their processes aren't always intuitive and can add significant pain to the business. One way they prove value is by fixing the worst ones, committing to continuous process improvement, and providing metrics that demonstrate change. Examples of perennial offenders include:
- Eliminating "zero value work," such as squandering precious IT service desk time on resetting passwords
- Transforming employee onboarding from days to minutes, with automated virtual provisioning
- Future-proofing change and release processes, so foundational systems stay intact when configuration management databases (CMDBs) are updated.
2. Your competition is the SaaS economy.
IT has competed with vendors before, but now their competition is the market itself. IT leaders should think: How can they add value to the business? Here are some examples of what new SOOs do:
- Self-organize as business-accountable, fast, nimble teams that drive value towards achieving key initiatives and the overall business strategy.
- SaaS-ify their own processes by making them lightweight and interoperable.
- Decompose their solutions, so that the business can assemble them into their own services at will.
- Develop Data as a Service offerings that help optimize business processes, such as consumption of services.
3. Become an innovation and operational savant.
Companies used to spend 90% on operations and 10% on innovation. In some industries, CIOs have already achieved 70/30 and are headed to 50/50. They have done the hard work of transformation. By so doing, they have freed up time, talent, and dollars for change. Consider these examples cited by Deloitte:
- A CIO of a consumer goods company reduced IT operational costs by $150M over three years and won half back for technology modernization and innovation.
- Cisco is working to deploy all of IT as "everything as a Service."
- The CIO in our previous blog is leading her Top 10 company through massive industry change with the help of an agile IT organization
At Intellinet, we believe that there are three key benefits of becoming service-oriented:
- You increase visibility and transparency into the entire IT ecosystem. For example, with service-oriented CMDBs, any internal IT organization, such as HR or Procurement, can dynamically see the services they are consuming.
- You align all aspects of IT, including development, IT operations, security (DevSecOps with Service Management) compliance and regulatory, with the business, making the path forward more seamless.
- You increase efficiency and velocity, because you are iterating your way forward, fixing things as you go, and increasing your gains. Over time, stair-stepping IT initiatives with agile becomes a lunge.
Become a transformation leader today.
Contact Intellinet today to learn how we can help.