Tom Peruzzi's thoughts on digital, innovation, IT and operations

Mostly technicians seem to have an incredible understanding about service delivery. For them this means that they own and control the whole delivery chain, beginning by each stored bit and byte going over to the databases, the apps, the network, the associated (and hopefully existing) security, the frontend, the user training and and and … and if possible please forget documentation, we know what we do 🙂

But world changes, even now we stand on another step forward within a realy service oriented, clouded environment and the more you think about clouds, the more you have to dematerialize service delivery. It is not a bunch of servers connected with a bunch of network devices, secured with a bunch of security appliances which creates the service, the service is much more and the goal of modern IT should not be to deliver hardware-related stuff to non IT staff. For them IT does not matter (btw. thanks to the great book, Nicolas Carr) they just want to use. And non IT thinks different, they think – as we intend to say – emotional not rational about IT; either it works appropriate and the service desk is OK or it is not sufficient delivered. And they think in terms of economy.

An IT service delivered to the non IT people should be competitive in terms of service and pricing and it should be interoperable and portable. As we know, lots of offers out their try to do so and making a deeper view into it offers incredible stuff …

And what happens now? All the cloud offers, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, internal and external, private, enterprise or public, shortly the clouds offer new innovative services with much more speed, power, resources and economies of scale.

Why should I continue maintaining my own hardware, software … if I do commodity stuff? It will be more expensive, more to integrate, more to maintain … so my resources are secured but nobody knows for how long.

Right now there exist only a few real issues for not going to a cloud:

• cloud to cloud data exchange is still lacking true interoperable and useable security
• the right size, if you have reached a size where you can gain profit from the top discounts too the gap within money will be closed.
• Real-Time, if you need Real Time you will have to build it for yourself (now)
• compliance: potentially, especially in the financial industry you will not be allowed to move your user data out of the computing country.

So the goal or mission of the IT of the (near) future will be, to aggregate the service delivery which is spread over the world. The IT will take care of

• interoperability
• portability
• first level
• combined service catalogue
• economics

If so, what should you change today? Yes maybe ITIL, but ITIL should be no more than it is, a goo practice. Use, what’s useable for you but think about your service definition and how to get that deep into the organization that you know which IT is needed and why. Acting as an account manager and understanding the own company as the key customer would potentially help. Leave IT behind, think in solutions and services and deliver them in time and with appropriate objectives (nobody asks who delivers, so if it looks like you but it comes trom anywhere else ….)

So please start thinking about the tremendous change what will happen in the near future and don’t repeat the last 20 years standard opstake: you can’t deliver and own all services within a more and more complex IT world.