Part 2: IaaS and the New Role of the IT manager

Read Part 1 here.

How does Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) impact the role of our Cloud IT Manager? Well, first of all, he will need to learn some new skills, the first one being virtualization management. Second, to have any chance of deploying his current intertwined spaghetti of applications into the cloud he needs to find a method to disentangle these applications. Deploying virtualization on an in house infrastructure (an internal cloud) can be a very workable catalyst here. Also he needs to find a way to offer his applications just as cost effective and scalable as "competing" SaaS providers. Again virtualization may be the way to do so.  Does this mean virtualization is all that matters? No, but without it, any "cloud" attempts are the same as plain old outsourcing, hosting or time sharing.

This virtualization needs to go hand in hand with Automation, together they form the building blocks of any cloud. A cloud environment implies dynamically scaling up and down capacity, based on demand. This is not possible fast enough if we create and configure our virtual machines manually.  That is where automation comes in. Doing automation without virtualization would not work, as the complexity of the provisioning tasks to be automated would be just too high.  This is not the only reason for deploying automation, apart from cost savings we want our Cloud IT manager to spend more time on business and less on technology, or if you like more time with users and less with plumbing,  as this is a crucial cloud benefit. 

Probably just as important as virtualization and automation for a successful cloud strategy is a reliable infrastructure for accessing the cloud (a.k.a. the network). Unlike with traditional PC applications, users of cloud applications are very unforgiving for any network outages or delays. A provider of SaaS bookkeeping applications in the Amsterdam area lost a significant number of his SME customers after a two-day outage of the major local Internet provider. Our Cloud IT manager is likely to lose his job if he allows for similar mishap in an enterprise environment. Together with Security this is one of the reasons why companies are starting today with an "Internal Cloud", even if their long term strategy is to leverage the public cloud (see question 4 in this Wall Street Journal Cloud pop quiz).

Another important thing to realize is that in the majority of cases "the Cloud", internal or external, will initially be an additional set of infrastructure. In most organizations the introduction of Mini's did not replace the Mainframe and neither did the WinTel space heaters replace all Unix Servers. Anyone who believes "the Cloud" will replace all in house systems, may also believe we can fix the climate problem by everybody driving electric cars by 2015. In addition companies will not have "one cloud". They will source cloud resources from multiple vendors, to optimize cost and balance risk. This means that, instead of reducing complexity, any cloud effort may initially increase complexity.

If you felt having good change processes and reliable configuration data was important in today's relatively stable datacenters, guess how crucial this will be is in a dynamic "provision to order" cloud environment, where virtualization enables a certain process to use different (virtual) resources every day, hour or even minute.  We all know the stories about IT departments that are afraid to switch off a certain server, because they have no idea what it does. Imagine this being a virtual server that we are paying for by the minute. We better understand which (business) processes this server is supporting, so we can decide whether it is safe to switch it off or not.

Helping understand and manage all this complexity if of course exactly where frameworks like ITIL and COBIT come in.  Ideally they help us to build an understanding of goals, risk, cost, configurations and especially interdependencies to offer a transparent view, also across these various infrastructure platforms.  But we need more than just a view. Ideally we want to be able to dynamically move applications to the (cloud) platform that is the most cost or energy efficient. This demands an integrated view across platforms, and although frameworks like ITIL and COBIT are infrastructure agnostic, most of us unfortunately deployed these frameworks with platform or department specific procedures and processes. Some integration of these procedures will need to be done. Let's make sure we do not create yet another set of cloud procedures to be filed next to our mainframe and windows procedures, especially as virtualization enables us to eventually move applications - more or less freely - across these platforms.

Last item to mention here separately is Risk. Last week the Times online addition spoke about Stormy times for cloud computing in the context of Microsoft and T-Mobile's Sidekick data loss mishap.  Dismissing cloud because of risk would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I know of no companies that build their own hard disks, because they do not trust hard disk vendors. They do take precautions:  they don't buy the cheapest, keep a backup, and have a recovery plan. That is why any cloud IT investments, not just IaaS, should go through the proper (IT) channels. So they can be screened for risk, security and cost issues. Risk management and Cloud Deployment have to go hand in hand and COBIT is a good way to connect them.

In my next blog post: SaaS and the role of our Cloud  IT Manager.

Cloud Computing and the new (leaner?) role for the IT manager, Part 1.

In last week’s blog post I suggested we already were at the top of the Publishing hype cycle for Cloud. Little did I know that just about every magazine to hit my doormat this week would be a dedicated special issue about Cloud Computing. The most innovative was a double feature that when read from front to back- gave a management perspective, while turning it upside down and reading it back to front gave a technical perspective, with the two target audiences metaphorically meeting in the middle. Highlights included the classification of the traditional CIO as Chief Infrastructure Officer (by Salesforce) and the conclusion that IT staff in a Cloud Environment need to have “Know-What” instead of “Know-How.”

So how is the role of the IT manager changing? SalesForce.com has been marketing its solutions under the slogan "NO SOFTWARE" and Amazon's Elastic Cloud promises virtually (pun intended): "NO HARDWARE.” Does this mean for the IT Manager: "NO JOB?” No, certainly not! But what does a Cloud IT Manager do then? And will a Cloud IT manager be a Lean(er) IT Manager. First, let me state I do not have all the answers and that I welcome your ideas and feedback. Second, to discuss the role of a Cloud IT Manager we need to distinguish different types of Cloud Computing. The often quoted NIST definition (mind you, version 15) of Cloud computing distinguishes three models: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure of a Service (IaaS).

To keep this blog readable I am not going to define and describe each type here in detail but it is worth noting that with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), users do not need to know or be aware that our Cloud IT Manager is using the IaaS cloud, while vice versa - with SaaS - the IT Manager often is not aware that users are already deploying this (so much for our Holy Grail of IT Alignment). As a result I will discuss these separately.

Platform as a Service (PaaS ) may very well prove to be the most interesting type of Cloud Computing, as a platform for building custom applications would allow and require the Cloud IT Manager to again actively engage with business users about what they want or need functionally. Personally I like to think PaaS may reconnect users and IT. Unlike with IaaS - where users are often unaware - and SaaS - where IT may feel left out - PaaS enables IT to build cloud functions that the users can deploy. Something we all did and loved back in the days of bespoke (custom build) software, but somehow this became a lost art when standard packages became the norm (the time we all became “Chief Infrastructure Officers/Operators”). But PaaS is also the area with the least practical experience and the most confusion (some may say really flexible SaaS is PaaS; if I can freely configure my application it becomes a platform. Others feel that PaaS could be building something on a traditional platform and then deploying it on the Cloud (IaaS) . So for now we will focus on IaaS and SaaS to examine our Cloud IT manager’s role.

Cloud Computing , another “4 P’s in a Pot” Innovation?

I guess the title of this blog post needs a little explanation. Back in college - we're talking 80's here - professor Dr. ir. G.C. Nielen gave me some insight into the laws of innovation. His 4P law of academic innovation started with P for Problem.  Next individuals would Ponder on the Problem, the third step was Publishing, after which the resulting financing was used to Pilot the idea. Pretty soon after that most ideas would disappear into a Pot never to be heard of again (4 P's in a Pot). Guess what P we are now in for Cloud Computing?

Of course, as young students we didn't believe his premise. Young and innocent as we were, it seemed a lot more logical to move the step Publish after the Pilot. So, after school and none the wiser, I began a "brilliant" career in bringing innovations to market in Europe.  I introduced - or should I say piloted - business Intelligence years before datawarehouses; MRP years before ERP;  Object Oriented years before SOA; and SOA years before XML and Java. To top things off I promoted the Mobile Web using WAP (A collegue once said "WAP" is the sound the phone makes when thrown into the Pot by the less patient users). Needless to say living on the bleeding edge was intellectually stimulating but commercially devastating.

So why a blog about Cloud Computing now? Is it past the bleeding edge? Well, the main trigger for this blog is the official "Administration Cloud Computing Announcement" by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra earlier this month (view here on YouTube). If you have not watched it, I would urge you to do so now. It is not every decade that you get to see a 19 billion dollar budget take a 90 degree turn in a live webcast. With Clinger Cohen, the US government set the tone for governmental IT spend, something we in Europe are still trying to catch up with (see lessons from a decade of Clinger-Cohen). The impact of this announcement may be tenfold bigger, although Vivek Kundra is clear that the journey will be comparable in time (10 years or more).

As you know, this is a blog about Lean IT and Service Management. What the impact of Cloud Computing exactly will be on service management is not clear yet. Anyone who leads you to believe otherwise is likely to be "Publishing before having Played with it." And I'm not talking about running large and highly scalable datacenters. There is plenty of experience with that around. And if you may think cloud services by definition are bigger than any in house applications, I suggest you have a brief look at the need for speed, Here Paul Michaud compares cloud service "Twitter - sorry we are having problems" with something really fast and scalable, like a modern bank, telco or stock exchange. 
I am talking about the everyday IT manager that works with his business users. He just got over moving from designing bespoke software to running standard of the shelf packages. Which by the way may very well may be the reason for the predominant focus of today's IT people on running infrastructure, Vivik Kundra observed.  And now another paradigm shift (have not seen that word used in a while!) is coming with the move to SaaS and Cloud. History repeats itself, as David Cappuccio of Gartner observes, just like with the first PCs, decades ago, some usage is creeping in already, whether we in IT are ready or not. Over the coming period I plan to exchange some of my personal thoughts and experiences on this topic via this blog. 

But first let's do a "level set" on some of the current thinking regarding cloud computing. The term cloud computing was first introduced in an academic context in 1997 by Ramnath K. Chellappa,  who originally defined it for the Informs conference in Dallas as "a computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits.^[22]  A refreshingly more pragmatic and technology agnostics view then some of the more current ones. A recent one I saw was for example "Something remote we access over the web."  But definitions, like this one on Wikipedia  are only words. Nowadays we define concepts using animations (again on YouTube). Here are some of my favorites: Cloud Computing Explained, Cloud computing Plain and simple, Cloud Computing as defined by salesforce.com and of course the US government one - embedded in the video mentioned above.

Have a look, hope you'll be back soon to join the discussion on how this could or should impact our favorite little neck of the woods: Service Management.

Have you got what it takes? Play PPM Hero today and find out!

CA is launching a new, exciting and fun interactive online game. In PPM Hero, the game, projects leaders run around an office trying to solve problems (sounds familiar?). The fun part is that you can get additional funding for your project by correctly answering various PPM questions. While loading up some energy at the PPM tool screens gives you protection from the project police. At the internal test we had over a 1000 wannabe heroes compete for a spot at the top of the internal leader board. Play today and see how you rank!

But there is also a more serious side. You can submit your own questions to test the project management capability of the other players even further (the original ones were created together with The Butler Group). The best questions will be used to create the benchmark, future heroes will be measured against.

Click here to begin the game

Certified - So you think you can dance?

Learn the Steps or Feel the Beat?
Everyone who ever attended event night at one of the major software vendors’ user conferences knows, “Real IT people don’t dance” (or should I say “IT people don’t really dance”). Yet I plan to use a dance analogy when discussing the various best practice frameworks and methods we IT people like to get certified in. Frameworks and methods like (here we go): ITIL, CobIT, Prince2,PMbok, RUP, Tickit, TOGAF, etc.Did you ever wonder why there is a world championship for ballroom dancing, but not one for individual dances such as the Waltz, the Foxtrot or the Tango? I bet you never did. But actually there are only two championship categories, Standard and Latin. (source: www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballroom_dance).

I guess the reason is that if you can only do one dance (like the one you learned for your wedding party) you’re not really considered a dancer. Now, just like the previously mentioned IT methods, these dances are distinctly different. However, they do share a standard vocabulary, standard exams and common framework of reference.

Now in Holland, if we have two people with a joint idea they start an association (or maybe a “coffee”-shop). And if two guys across the river have a similar idea, they start one too. Of course in our Dutch melting pot of cultures, we have historically had a good reason for all these separate associations: one was Catholic, one reformed, one Protestant, one Lutheran, one Jewish and one typically atheist (a.k.a. communist/socialist). But what is our excuse in IT to have so many?

There are some promising signs we are coming to our senses in IT. Maybe the credit crunch crisis has some benefit after all? The PMI (member wise one of the largest bodies) is looking over the wall, by participating in Agile2009, presenting at Fusion09 and even attending the Gartner PPM summit. CobIT and ITIL have published guidance on how they best work together. The DSDM Consortium Benelux is now also the Agile Consortium i.o. And a relatively new movement like Lean is bridging the very different worlds (or should we rather say different galaxies) of IT development and IT operations.

Should we, in that case, not also strive for integral certifications, having people with a balanced knowledge across several related topics? The least it would do is cater for shorter business cards (for the few people with more acronyms behind their name than there are letters in the alphabet).

What Would Such an Integral Certification Look Like?
For sure it would not only include IT subjects. I happened to be one of the first people in Holland to receive a Masters in “Managerial Information Sciences” (BIK) Mind you, this was back in the eighties. We already had several technical IT studies (like informatics and digital electronics) but this was the first study aimed at managing (and not building) IT. The curriculum was managed by the economic faculty and included subjects like accounting, marketing and production management, but also borrowed heavily from other disciplines like Law (business, international and information law), Informatics (computer sciences, programming, systems theory) and philosophy and psychology. The last two were expected to have a positive impact as IT - and especially IT management - is about people. Being an academic study, any practical skills (like project management) were of course completely absent from the curriculum.

Needless to say “Managerial Information Sciences” was a varied and interesting study, which delivered generalists. Not people who do one task particularly well, but people who understand and oversee the big picture and bring the different constituencies together. Basically it prepared me perfectly for the world of Cloud Computing, where technical details and skills become less and less important. Unfortunately this was twenty years before anyone even was using the word Cloud. Don’t worry - I managed to pick up some specific skills (like blogging ;-)) later on.

So You Think You Can Dance?
This brings me to the main question of this blog post, how do you certify that somebody “got it”. In other words, how do you judge whether someone indeed can dance? One thing is sure, you don’t determine it by asking him or her for the definition of the foxtrot’s basic turn or reverse weave. And it is beyond me why anyone would think we should ask for such definitions in an ITIL exam. The true test of good learning is that you can apply it years or even decades later, often in situations you never imagined and to solve problems it never was intended for. That is the difference between learning a trick - like a monkey - and true knowledge: a frame of reference you can apply to different situations. That’s why the idea of adopt & adapt for any best practice or body of knowledge is so essential.

Globally there are two distinctly different schools of thought around this. One is that you describe the intent, and the receiver makes his own decisions based on what he feels will best accommodate the intent. The other one is that you describe in detail what the receiver is to do or not to do. An accounting example: European rules say that the financial books should reflect the true state of an organization’s financial situation. While North American rules say “You shall not have special entities” (SOX rule added after Enron) and thy shalled not use Ponzi schemes to pay existing investors using investments from new entrants (expect that rule to be added or at least rephrased soon). Needles to say the second list of rules will be longer, easier to circumvent (if it does not explicitly say it is forbidden, it is allowed) and less effective.

Another example: the early versions of quality standard ISO9000 stated that practices and processes should be documented and people should adhere to these written procedures. So if an organisation wrote down that “whoever picks up the phone decides on discounts”, and people indeed worked that way, then they got an ISO 9000 certification. And if you ever did mandatory computer based ethics training you surely answered questions like “Accepting gifts is not allowed for legal, compliance and financial reasons.” Name three reasons why you should not accept gifts?” Wow, we became a lot more ethical through that training!

Our IT frameworks and methods are not only too fragmented (as discussed earlier), but somehow they also seem to be becoming more and more mechanical (tricks instead of knowledge). Looking at some of the comments this week on the ITIL V3 refresh (there are hundreds of comments out there) and reading about inconsistencies in definitions which apparently caused people to fail exams (seriously!) ITIL also seems to have fallen into this “tricky” trap. As described earlier, good knowledge in my view is not only adopted but also adapted. Maybe the upcoming refresh can be blessing in disguise, as it can get us back to an adapt approach. After all the best dancers are not the ones that stick to the steps, but the ones that move to the beat.

A Service Portfolio approach to Cost Management

Do Lean Times require Smart IT, or does Lean IT mean Smart Times?

This week a major European IT magazine launched Smart IT, an expert forum dedicated to how smarter IT can help reduce enterprise cost, So not just IT cost itself. It is only fitting that the first case discussed here was a retail case, because there is no industry where cost management is so essential. The traditional thin margins of retail make cost management a way of live and not just something you do in hard times.

But if you now think “glad I did not choose a career in retail”, I have to disappoint you. Fortune magazine described it eloquently in this month’s “My (recovery) Playbook” article. It is time to end the waiting game. The economy we have today, is the economy we have. Any plans need to start from here. High unemployment, low GDP growth and almost impossible to obtain credit is not an anecdote we will tell our grand kids about, it is the economy our kids will grow up in. So let’s see what can we learn from this retail case.

Major European retailer Debenhams announced this week they managed to improve in store customer service while at the same time reducing support related cost by 25%. As in most modern retailer every aspect of Debenhams’ business is supported by IT — from point of sale transactions and its website to the supply chain, warehousing and general ledger. This means a lot of the companies investments and change efforts involve IT. Earlier this year the organization implemented a Project and Portfolio solution to reduce costs and prevent wasting resources on unprofitable or ineffective projects and to boost the success rate of its IT projects. In addition they started formal tracking of 60 separate change programs across the company.

The increased efficiency that PPM brought increased the capacity for delivering more IT projects. Bringing greater value to the business and ultimately Debenhams’ customers. Following the success in IT, the organization started extending Project and Portfolio management to other areas such as training and store planning.

But running projects to create new services is only a part of the total cost and enterprise incurs. Many are familiar with the statistic that only 30% of the average budget can be spend discretionary while about 70% is needed to just “keep the lights on”, or -in service management terms - on delivering the services we created last year. So in a true Service Portfolio Management spirit, this organization expanded their improvements efforts to incorporate their existing services, starting with the support cost of these services. Quit fittingly for a retail organization they leveraged the idea of self service extensively. A whopping 15% of issues now are resolved without any human intervention. This did not only reduce the overall cost of rendering support by 25% but at the same time accommodated another major retail goal. Allowing in-store staff to spend the majority of their time actually interacting with customers , and not on filling out forms or holding on the phone while waiting for the helpdesk.

This organization adopted and adapted ITIL (as it was intended) and took a truly integral approach to Service Management (if you like Service Portfolio Management). After having formalized the creation of new services through Project and Portfolio Management and the support of existing services through Service Operations (Service Support) management, they now are looking at more tightly managing the full life cycle of these services by further maturing the change processes around bringing new services live, maintaining running services and decommission retired services.

Is this all Debenhams did to maintain their margins and bottom line in today’s lean times? No, other new projects and services, where some aspect IT was involved, included opening new stores in multiple countries, introducing a beauty card loyalty scheme, moving consumer preference from (lower margin) concession brands to higher margin “Own bought” brands and integrating in-store and online channels through innovative concepts such as “Click and Collect”, “Track and Trace” and “In-store ordering”. Illustrating that one improvement –in today’s economy – is not enough to maintain the bottom line.

This however means that today’s management needs to be able to cope with the increased complexity of fighting multiple wars at multiple (new and existing) fronts, all at the same time, while simultaneously improving the efficiency of their current “keeping the lights on” operations. Something IT can play a major supporting - or even guiding - role in.

Is a Thin client also a Lean client? Or are we now Clouding the issue and is not all Chrome that glitters?

Today Google announced their second OS, but somehow this got a lot more attention than their first (Android). I am sure this has to do with the fact it now seems an all out war between two giants, both doing Search, both doing Mobile, both doing Office Suites and now both doing OS’s. All four are multi-billion dollar markets, but strangely this battle seems to be all about the browser, a market where, so far, nobody managed to make a buck.

In fact the idea of a portable browser came originally from a third billion dollar giant. Back then it was called Thin Client. Now we may call it a Netbook, iPhone or AppPhone, but the premise is still to put as little clutter (waste) between the user and the app or the content (the value). Which starts to sound like (minimize waste, maximize value a.k.a. …) Lean IT.

Now, if you live next to a bakery store, we all agree it makes no sense to fire up your oven every morning for some fresh bagels (or croissants depending on which part of the globe you live). But if the nearest bakery is so far away you cannot get there in your pajama, then having you own oven (and a supply of conveniently prebaked bagels) starts to make sense.

So what could Chrome OS eventual mean? It could mean end users go out and buy standard access devices (netbooks, phones, smart TVs and even desktops), which they use to access applications (Gmail, Google Apps, but also business apps like Salesforce or other SaaS providers) that run outside their place of work. Welcome to Consumerization!

There were three reasons this did not happen earlier: 1) the network was too slow for a good (graphical) user experience and 2) Business apps were not available outside the enterprise.
But even with one and two fixed , users would still be going from site to site being their own integration engine by cutting and pasting or retyping all the time. It is here where the OS can help. It took Windows 10 years to go from DDE, via OLE to COM, COM+, DCOM, etc. etc. but today two browser sessions - also due to of security concerns – do not have the same level of integration as desktop apps. Because the Chrome OS is “starting over” they have a chance to tackle this. It will be cool to use a CRM application from one provider and a financial application from another and have them work seamlessly together on the desktop (meanwhile other companies, with Salesforce.com in front, are working hard on getting the apps to also work seamlessly together at the server/database level).

Now will this make our enterprises leaner? Well, only if we use this to replace some of the complexity we already have, not if we just add it to the stack (so instead of 3 OS’s, we support 4 or 5 ). Also we will need to decide what types of bread we want to bake in-house and what types of bread we source from the cloud. And if we are smart, we make our remaining in-house bakeries into little private clouds, so the user sees no difference and we can source these later.

Why is it so complex to make IT simple?

Whenever I tell someone I work for an IT company, you see a little spark of fear pop into their eyes while they quickly check their watch. Probably because they know from experience (with other IT people not with me) that there is a big chance the conversation will become complex, lengthy and likely even incomprehensible. So lately I just tell them I work in marketing, which leads to longer and more engaged conversations. But it did make me wonder how IT got into this position, and more importantly, how we can get out of it.

Now, it was not always like this. On my first working day, fresh out of university, when joining the IT department of AKZO (now Akzo Nobel), there was coffee and cake. Not because I joined (it was the 70ties) but because a colleague was leaving for Spain. He was taking a small server with Akzo business applications and a book “How to learn Spanish in 30 days” with him. Four months later he was back and had implemented all of Akzo’s standard processes in the newly bought Spanish consumer products division. And he had lots of stories about the Spanish consumer market, the competition, the customers the food, the weather and about our new colleagues. He had spend most his time with users (sales people, logistics people, marketing etc.) and almost no time with other IT people (also because we did not have many in Spain) and as a result was consulted regularly by the European Management team on matters concerning Spain or other new markets. Back then we did not have Enterprise ERP, SOA’s or Enterprise Serviced Busses, we just had specific applications for purchasing, inventory, order entry, invoicing etc. (guess we would call these silo’s now) and a good understanding of how AKZO’s wanted to manufacture and market consumer products.

Somehow that got lost, now IT talks mainly about SAP, Oracle or Data warehousing and 90% of the time we talk with other IT people. Granted, IT is more important and there is a lot more IT around than in the past and because scale is larger and the level of (technical) integration is much higher, the complexity is often overwhelming, but there must be a way to get back to what really matters (business).

Luckily there are two recent developments that help achieve that. They are on the one hand Portfolio Management Techniques and on the other hand Lean IT. If you are new to Portfolio Management check out "Laws of IT" explores Service Portfolio Management, Lean IT builds on manufacturing best practices and has been discussed earlier in this blog, but make sure you do not miss this vintage paper The IT-dustrial revolution on Lean IT (literally Lean IT avant la lettre).

Lean times call for Lean IT

The full version of this article was co-developed with CA communications.

CIOs find themselves in a tough spot. Budgets have been cut, but the expectations for service delivery remain high. So CIOs are going lean; applying ‘lean’ thinking to their IT strategies. Lean IT allows CIOs to focus on what's most important: delivering value to their internal and external customers ― while lowering costs.

This pragmatic management discipline was road-tested in the manufacturing sector, where lean pioneers like Toyota and Xerox identified ways to eliminate any waste long ago. Lean principles make heavy use of simple visual techniques like KanBan cards. Such lean visualisation techniques apply just as equally to the management of IT services and the underlying technology infrastructure. In IT however, business services consist of intangible bits and packets coursing through electronic infrastructure. It’s not visibly apparent which servers and infrastructure components are supporting which services, so it becomes imperative to visualise end-to-end transactions and the infrastructure that sits under these transactions.

Navigating the Lean IT journey
So what steps can CIOs take in their drive to maximise value while minimising waste? What are the fundamental enablers of Lean IT? There are four areas to consider:

Business engagement with IT
Life doesn’t stop in an economic downturn. The business still requires new or updated IT applications and services to support their strategic initiatives. Here, portfolio management can provide insight into the investment planning process to help ensure that funds are allocated to the IT projects that best support business objectives.

Transaction visibility
To improve customer value, it is important to know what the customer is experiencing. Are your customer-facing applications giving you a reputation for first-class service and responsiveness or causing frustrated customers to seek out your competition? As almost any CIO will testify, in today’s complex data centre infrastructure it’s more difficult than ever to trace the root cause of a performance or availability degradation which may be impacting service quality.

Operational excellence
Strategies to achieve operational excellence include identifying and smoothing out bottlenecks, automating processes to reduce wait-time and errors, and maximising IT asset utilisation through technologies like virtualisation. In essence, just-in-time resourcing needs to become a key discipline within IT.

Security and compliance
When thinking lean, you can’t ignore risk and compliance. At many companies, compliance processes are highly manual and redundant; many different groups use their own spreadsheets or other fragmented toolsets, which can quickly get out of synch, leading to further risk and cost. By centralising compliance information and standardising processes and toolsets, you can reduce risk, remove redundancies, and increase agility to respond as regulations change.

There’s no time to waste: think Lean IT now

Download the the full version of this article

More information on Lean IT at British Airways at http://bit.ly/2ExLiI and on Lean IT at Fujitsu at http://bit.ly/19m55B

A Catalog of Ways to Achieve Lean IT

The full version of this article was co-developed with CA communications

Applying ‘Lean’ principles allow IT to identify and eradicate anything that is wasteful within IT management. A Service Catalog can be an indispensible component of Lean IT, helping drive down costs and ensure organisations are better positioned to lead when the economy recovers.

Lean manufacturing is relevant to IT operationsThe principles that originated from manufacturing have a place in the management of IT services and the underlying technology infrastructure. To understand why, it’s necessary to look at the role of IT: to develop, support and enhance business services that deliver value to the organisation and its customers. Similar to manufacturing goods, the development of business services involves managing demand, prioritising activities, marshalling finite resources and controlling defects.

Across this business service production line, there are multiple areas within IT operations that add no value to the finished product or service. These elements of waste range from time spent managing defects (through, for example, fixing problems caused by unauthorised changes), to over-provisioning service capacity, to time-intensive manual procedures that could easily be automated.

Applying lean techniques to IT operationsThe idea of using lean techniques to reduce waste in the manufacture of business services has been explored by many IT organisations. However, its usage has typically been restricted to application development, which shares many of the factory production style techniques. IT operations can also be managed from a Lean perspective. Fujitsu Services, for example, has invested heavily in creating industrialised IT infrastructures and services; making them more efficient, more reliable, quicker to implement and easier to change. as documenten in "Masters of Lean IT"
Great opportunities to gain the benefits of lean also exist when organisations optimise those aspects of IT that work closely with the business. The notion of demand management in IT is in many ways similar to pull processing in lean manufacturing.
The role of the Service Catalog in Lean ITOperational and Tactical demand management― often referred to as ‘keeping the lights on’―lends itself particularly well to lean thinking, since it typically consumes up to70% of the IT budget. A service catalog provides IT operations with a process to offer and deliver a broad range of services more efficiently and effectively. Here, IT utilises Service ‘Catalogs’ to document and describe all the services it provides, together with agreed-upon service levels and cost. Users submit requests to the Service Catalog via a web browser, and since these solutions incorporate automated workflows, each request is routed through its required approval cycle.

Today’s IT organisations no longer focus on managing technology, but rather run and optimise a continuous business service production line. And like every production line, waste can surface everywhere. A Service Catalog reduces waste and costs by streamlining and automating request and delivery processes. Those that are successful will not only drive down costs, but also be better positioned to lead business and economic improvement.

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