IT Transformation: Avoiding Pitfalls

In the last two blogs, I talked about the reasons for IT Transformation, understanding Enterprise Environment and how to effectively set management goals. As more and more companies begin to move towards IT Transformation, there are mistakes that businesses should be weary of. Today I will discuss the pitfalls that can slump the IT transformation process, as well as, the services Cisco has been developing to help Enterprise on the journey to IT transformation.

Here are some common pitfalls to be avoided during the IT Transformation process:

Selling IT Transformation as a way to lower IT costs is a shortsighted approach that hinders Transformation’s visibility, curtails the use of new trends such as Cloud and forces initiative as a tactic, rather than a strategy.

Transformation projects restricted to technical architectures changes without appropriate considerations for IT architecture to support long-term business service needs, application performance, governance, compliance and impact to human resources will yield limited value in long run.

Failure to communicate the value of IT Transformation project or longer-term impact to the business end-users and partners is also one of the biggest risks, seeing as IT teams do not have capacity to cost-justify transformation. Communicating the value and engaging the business early and often is important to help everyone understand the value of saving IT cost through transformation. Reducing costs lead to reinvestment in new IT architectures for long-term business services needs.

A lack of coordination among teams in IT and Business entities that could benefit from Transformation can significantly hinder long-term success and leads to governance and compliance issues. Having a centralized IT Transformation center of excellence can go long way to addressing this issue.

Hence, cost saving is an important reason to launch IT Transformation initiative, reinvestment of savings in new IT architectures and capabilities is important for the sustainability and adoption of this initiative for long term business success.

These considerations mentioned above are descriptive and not prescriptive. In other words, they guide one’s actions and do not dictate how to achieve an end result.

As more and more businesses embark on this transformation journey, Cisco has been developing services to help Enterprises in their journey for IT Transformation. These services are tailored to those Enterprises who understand that IT transformation is a journey that requires a strategic approach. It can be that they are starting IT Transformation journey or have experimented with transformation or Cloud projects successfully or unsuccessfully and want to benefit from Cisco IT’s journey of Transformation. Below are four key services that I’d like to highlight, each of them supporting different phases of the Transformation journey that have been developed based off of Cisco IT’s experience and findings:

Infrastructure Catalog & Costing:

Detailed analysis (or creation) of IT infrastructure services to be offered by IT

Detailed analysis of IT infrastructure service costing

Recommendations as to how IT should/could calculate and represent costs for said infrastructure services

Org & Governance Strategy:

How is my IT Governance model going to have to change when I move to a highly serviced aligned manner?

Create governance process around service lifecycle measurement

How do metrics need to change?

New roles, skills, product management roles

Above also includes security and process modeling considerations

IT Transformation Strategy & Roadmap:

Analyze business goals against current IT contributions

Analyze IT organization capabilities and operational / organizational maturity to effectively deliver IT-as-a-Service

Identify the barriers to success

Present vision of how IT organization could more effectively impact / influence the business

Present recommendations as phased approach as to how the IT organization would be able to deliver IT-as-a-Service

Business Service Alignment:

Ensure IT service & application align with business goals / objectives / processes

Identify gaps between existing services and business needs / requirements / opportunities

Recommend modifications to IT service and provide roadmap of services to add to more effectively enable the enterprise

Finally, as this is the last blog in series of three blogs, I would like to thank you for reading the series on how organizations can transform IT and achieve the goal of IT as business enabler by taking strategic approach and how Cisco can help facilitate organizations in developing the strategy.