{"id":27767,"date":"2019-07-31T09:18:57","date_gmt":"2019-07-31T08:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/?p=27767"},"modified":"2019-08-02T10:27:22","modified_gmt":"2019-08-02T09:27:22","slug":"the-evolution-of-the-it-operation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/2019\/07\/31\/the-evolution-of-the-it-operation\/","title":{"rendered":"IDC expert on the evolution of the IT operation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jon Tullett, Research Manager for IT Services at International Data Corporation (IDC) South Africa, looks at the evolution of the IT operation.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The days where the IT operation was a separate fiefdom with autonomy are gone. In most organisations, there are now components that are relatively closely aligned with the business and they are delivering specific business outcomes. IT operations now tend to be very workload or business unit specific in their support. The downside, however, is that different silos within the organisation have very different experiences, resulting in inconsistency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This has led to a certain level of\ndissatisfaction within the business, with those who are not getting their\nrequirements met resorting to finding their own solutions. That is really where\nthe Chief Digital Officer (CDO) concept started to emerge, to ensure that there\nis someone to coordinate all of this and improve the overall performance.\nDespite that, most organisations in South Africa are experiencing some flavour\nof that inconsistent outcome and the pressure in terms of evolving is to now\nreally start bringing in that level of consistency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Businesses do not know what they need to focus\non next, or which part of the business will be able to deliver value more\nquickly. They do know, however, that the support organisations need from the\nlikes of IT needs to be repositioned so that they can deliver on-demand. They,\ntherefore, need IT to move away from being tactical and responsive, and become\nmore agile, with the right technology, skills, and expertise to move quickly to\nsupport the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Move away from typical IT behaviour<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

IT is typically comprised of people who like to\noverprepare and then deliver something appropriate. This no longer works as\norganisations need to be more fluid in their approach. They can no longer take\nmonths to build things out as that will strip them of their competitive\nadvantage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our advice to end-user organisations is to have\nthe right platform approach so that they are better positioned for future\nevolution. It has a lot to do with the management for your infrastructure, the\ntype of data that you gather and how you interface with the business. It\u2019s\nabout getting closer alignment with the business, not just in a conceptual way,\nbut a molecular way. It is also about keeping in contact, making sure that IT\nis part of projects and that boundary functions such as security are understood\nfrom the outset rather than being focused on later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tackling the issue of skills<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ensuring they have the right skills in place is particularly challenging for South African organisations. They must have at least a medium-term view of what their architectural requirements are going to be. That is getting very complicated with cloud and even more so with emerging technologies such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can\u2019t anticipate everything in technology,\nbut you must ensure that you have the pieces in place to build that out rather\nthan having to start from scratch every time. This requires a flexible and\nadaptable infrastructure. This can be challenging in organisations where the\nprimary focus is on cost-containment, as they tend to provision the minimum of\nwhat they need at the time, which almost implies minimum flexibility for the\nfuture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Skills are in short supply and the market is\nvery competitive. They are hard to retain, and ongoing training is difficult,\nbut it must be done creatively and intelligently. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would recommend that organisations avoid\npoint skills unless it is absolutely necessary, and rather ensure that your\nskills internally are very broad, that they have collective exposure across the\nbusiness and have as much business context as possible. Where skills are\nrequired for specific technologies, use subcontractors or outsourcers, but\nensure that, internally, you have the integration, business, and management\nskills to stitch it all together. The pivot here is to move from focusing on\ntechnical skills to ensure you have the right integration skills in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An evolution driven by business expectation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the outside, it\u2019s all about customer and\npartner expectations. People expect you to be able to do business differently\nand adjust to meet their expectations in terms of service delivery, consistency\nand the ability to integrate systems. Internally, people have an expectation\nand some knowledge of what is out there in the market. They see case studies\nand hear stories of how organisations can function when everything is going\nright, and they want that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right now, we are in a place where the business\ndictates what the outcome is going to be and have an expectation around how\nthat will be serviced, regardless of how unrealistic the outcome may be. What\nwe need now is a closer alignment between business and IT so that the business\nunderstands when an expectation is unreasonable or an expectation of a way of\ndoing business is just incompatible with market conditions or the regulatory\nenvironment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This evolution is a natural progression in the\nbusiness and is an ongoing discussion we have with CIOs attending our annual\nIDC CIO Summit. What caught IT departments and managers by surprise was that\nthe business evolved in unexpected ways, such as the growth of cloud computing\nand the CX-oriented transformation within lines of business. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The business likewise had an expectation that\nIT operations would be able to evolve at the same pace. That led to a big\ndisconnect, and although many businesses are over that phase, now it is about\nmaking sure business and IT go through the next evolution together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jon Tullett, Research Manager for IT Services at International Data Corporation (IDC) South Africa, looks at the evolution of the IT operation. The days where the IT operation was a separate fiefdom with autonomy are gone. In most organisations, there are now components that are relatively closely aligned with the business and they are delivering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":27768,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4950,6,13,262],"tags":[386,851,9600,811,4322,4692,10488,2977,392,453],"class_list":["post-27767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-insights","category-top-stories","category-used","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-cdo","tag-chief-digital-officer","tag-cios","tag-idc-cio-summit","tag-international-data-corporation","tag-it-operation","tag-jon-tullett","tag-machine-learning","tag-south-africa"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27767"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27774,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27767\/revisions\/27774"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}