Gartner IT Operations & Management Summit: Changes Mean We’re a Long Way from Nirvana

Posted June 24th, 2008 by Joe Pendry

Gartner IOM This week, we are attending the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit 2008. The sessions at this summit have proven to be full of interesting information for the IT’s About Uptime Team, so we’ll be sending in posts from Orlando all week.

On Monday, I attended a keynote address from Donna Scott, Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst. She touched on the quest by IT Operations teams to achieve business alignment, and how this is often disrupted by “turbulence”…issues like compliance, new architectures and new technologies. Too often, IT Operations must take care of managing their environment at the expense of more strategic endeavors because – as she stated – “change is never ending” and it is hard to get to business alignment nirvana.

We couldn’t agree more. As we have posted in the past, change management maturity offers a host of business benefits. The most mature organizations can gain real business benefits such as fewer problems, greater confidence in changes and fewer emergency changes. This in turn, can allow them to focus on running IT as a business service.

Donna also mentioned a few key trends that are particularly prevalent these days:

Cost pressures. This is becoming more and more of an issue, requiring smart organizations to infuse a culture of continuous optimization that allows them to keep an eye on cost containment.
Alternate service delivery models. Strategies to support IT are varied and numerous. You can insource, outsource, leverage SaaS, utilize selective sourcing, or outsource only business processes to name a few. There is good and bad here – while these strategies offer flexibility, they can create business risk and alignment issues. According to Donna, there is nothing wrong with more diversity, but it needs to be managed with a common process. And, as we have blogged about (although we were focusing on virtualization), complexity can cause problems.
Business demands. Business wants IT to operate like a utility. Plug it in and let is run without interruption. Unfortunately IT can’t operate this way. No standard processes exist for IT Operations the way they do for utilities. There is no standard method, for example, to architect for or achieve availability.

One other interesting point. A survey of participants revealed that the top three pressures for attendees were:

24×7 availability
Cost containment
Business continuity

Lower down the list (almost last) was “Preparing for virtualization.” It seems that most organizations no longer need to prepare because the majority are already using virtualization in their organization. As we have discussed, this will put even more pressure on IT Operations to handle and manage change.

It seems IT Operations will be very busy in the near term. Business alignment nirvana might be the endpoint, but we have lots of road to travel before we get there.