Many organizations transform their IT but they still follow their traditional operations model. In this blog I would like to talk about importance of IT operating model and why it’s necessary.
What is an Operating Model?
An IT operating model is a framework that describes how an organization implements its strategies and delivers value to its internal and external customers.
Operating model plays a key role in your transformation journey to see results and value proposition. Having a new infrastructure is not going to make difference until you change the way you operate and opt for new operating model.
Why IT Operating Model?
Traditional IT operations are structured around technology, for example, server, storage, network and security. IT organizations and processes are typically set up to manage that technology, not IT services. The IT services that are offered are often “pieces and parts”, not composed services. Requests for services are handled through ticketing systems. Provisioning is manual, and slow. It can take weeks, or even months to get your infrastructure.
For example, it can take 15 separate tickets and up to 2 months to get storage allocated. Visualize a situation where the requester has to open tickets for storage devices, cabinet space, NIC cards, Worldwide Name Table entries, patch panel slots, Fabric ports, access, backup jobs… just to get storage!
To provide services faster you need to organize around service delivery, where standard services are provided through an automated self-service portal. You would also need to make both infrastructure and developer functions available through APIs. With this model, end users can get their services in hours and days, instead of weeks and months.
Changing the operating model is probably the most difficult part of transformation. You need to create IT roles and processes for managing the lifecycle of your new, automated IT services and for working with the business to understand their needs. Don’t wait to design your roles and processes until after the infrastructure is in place. That will be too late. Define the essential processes and roles for a service-based organization, particularly for initial infrastructure as a service (IaaS) services, early.
In IT operating model, you need roles and processes to manage the lifecycle of infrastructure services, cloud-native services and APIs. This includes the roles and processes needed to:
§ Work with business and developers to define IaaS and PaaS services and APIs
§ Build and support services and service catalog
§ Ensure governance, compliance and standards
In real world scenario an organization brought all the latest hardware and they have new cloud solutions but still it’s taking 30 days for them to provision new server. It’s because they haven’t changed their operating model.
As per their traditional process, once the new server is provisioned it will go through various teams’ inspection and it’s all manual and sometimes it takes months also to get approved and to release to end users.
Having new IT Operating model now it is taking an hour instead of months to provision new server.
Conclusion:
“Build new IT operating models (people and processes) to help organizations accelerate business outcomes and drive adoption and consumption of platforms. You’ll have improved communication and collaboration with the business and with developers, increased efficiency and agility, reduced costs, and improved service reliability and availability.