The IT industry is in need of a fundamental shift, much like the industrial revolution, where the growing demand by end users for IT services will force a new paradigm for software deployment and consumption that will be more efficient and cheaper, said an analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.
Garbani said popular approaches such as increasing headcount, virtualization, and process automation are often applied outside of a long-term IT strategy. “What you get at the end of the day, is more diversity in the tools and therefore more complexity,” said Garbani.
Organizations have the habit of building all of what they consume, such as building apps that, in turn, render IT services, said Garbani. But, as with the industrial revolution, the route to greater productivity at lesser cost is to acquire components of the IT environment from third parties who have already built it, believes Garbani.
Cloud computing, he continued, is that new paradigm that companies, such as Amazon and Google, have leveraged for economies of scale.
Yet, Garbani warns that this paradigm shift will force process change across the organization. With automated processes, less human intervention is required. IT admins, whose jobs have traditionally been very tactical, will find themselves in more strategic roles.
Only 26 per cent of IT professionals thought their IT service management processes were mature enough to manage cloud services. Meanwhile, half of respondents didn’t think their organizations were ready, and 23 per cent were unsure.
The same study also looked at the rate at which organizations are moving to the cloud. Twenty-eight per cent of respondents already adopted a cloud strategy in one or more areas of the organization. Five per cent have plans to deploy cloud services in the next three months. Twenty per cent plan to roll out cloud services in six months and beyond. Thirty-two per cent reported having zero plans to adopt a cloud strategy.
When it comes to IT service supply chains, Axios’s executive vice-president Markos Symeonides said many organizations he works with understand why they must have a complete view of how business services are built.
“These organizations must get an end-to-end view for all services, including cloud-based ones,” said Symeonides.
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