Mastering Complexity in Your As-a-Service Future

Today’s IT services industry is a veritable bumper car arena crowded with new technology and cloud-based services. The rules have not been posted, and the way forward is difficult to imagine. CIOs, whose stewardship of these products and services has an increasingly profound effect on the business, find themselves in the disorienting position of wanting to take full advantage of the opportunities presented by automation, the cloud and analytics, but often don’t have a complete picture of which offerings and providers are the best choices for their organization, or how to operationalize those new delivery models within their own environment.

As CIOs operate more and more as cloud brokers in this dynamic scenario, they have to recognize there’s no overnight fix for responding to so many competing priorities. The journey to becoming a truly optimized digital business is just that: one foot in front of the other.

To fully leverage new capabilities and still have a hand on the wheel, CIOs must first take time to understand the market, find partners that will facilitate healthy progress specific to their goals and decide on a handful of achievable ways they can be strategic enablers of the business. The following five ways are a good place to start:

1. Ensure clarity and alignment of IT services to business outcomes;
2. Collect and show data; numbers motivate people to improve;
3. Take advantage of automation, even in small steps, to reduce cost and boost capabilities;
4. Identify discrete areas, based on strategic value, to fully orient your operation to a highly agile structure, while making step improvements to your legacy operation;
5. Reorient how you deliver to a product-management focus, driving end-to-end delivery accountability to a single product manager.

I recently discussed these ideas in a live webinar and interactive Q&A. View and share my ISG Smartalk™ here.

About the author
Lois helps large global companies build innovative and industry-leading practices into their service integration, operational effectiveness and operating model transformation. She works with companies to create a strategy for service management, implement organizational, process and tooling capabilities and mobilize change across their environments. Lois has consulted with Fortune 500 clients across many geographies and industries to design and transform their service delivery operation, achieving the greatest amount of value and service from their Services. Lois offers expertise in IT governance, service provider performance and relationship management, service delivery strategy and design, ITIL service management, transformation and organizational change management and IT portfolio design and management. Prior to ISG, Lois served as Service Delivery Executive and Global Capability Owner for HP’s Multi-Supplier Integration Services.