After the technology bust at the turn of this century, the outcry for IT to show more accountability reached deafening levels. Although things are easing somewhat in terms of business confidence and willingness to make technology investments, the drive toward accountability hasn't--and shouldn't--go away. Rather than treating IT organizations as a quasi-academic mélange of professional skill sets grouped by knowledge, education and background, IT is evolving toward a more integrated set of competencies. What better way to support business value and quantify our contributions?
Think about it: Virtually all business structures depend on these axes--quality, cost and relevance--to navigate and assess their effectiveness. But this is still a very new set of principles for IT organizations--especially NSM groups--that have been protected for years by a brick wall of arcane acronyms and crusty attitudes that insulated us from the outside world.
The last major IT management change even approaching this magnitude was client/server and the rise of SNMP over SNA--a transformation many of us watched and took sides on, sometimes even marveled at. But at least client/server was about a visible system, a tangible structure you could get your arms around.
This new change, reflected in technologies like CMDB and SOAs on the one hand, and ITIL and BSM initiatives and a transformation of asset management on the other, is even more vast, far less tangible and, in the end, far less predictable. Rather than changing what IT must manage, it is changing, inalterably, how IT will go about the business of managing its services in support of needs that are business-defined, rather than purely technology-defined.
Chris Matney has 20 years technology and business development experience, with a focus on IT systems management. He currently leads Enterprise Management Associates' consulting practice, including its research into CMDB technology, and he created EMA's 8-Step IT Assessment Methodology. Write to him at [email protected].
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