Companies are looking to improve their infrastructure’s systemic qualities -- availability, security, performance, economics and change -- and set up their organizations for future success by aligning better to market dynamics and through benchmarking against known best practices.
Recently, we looked at the 2020 effect of transformation and enhanced work capabilities. Building on that, we also know the key objective is to adopt new technologies to leverage as a competitive weapon. That means deeply aligning business and product teams to IT to catch up and keep up with a continually and rapidly changing technology landscape, especially where existing processes and organizational capabilities are most impacted.
After decades of underestimating the original IT mission, which resulted in adoption of new technologies directly into business organizations, a disconnected and misaligned ecosystem of infrastructure services has emerged in many organizations. Now, we find ourselves in a time where many organizations are looking around, seeing these challenges and wonder how to move ahead.
The first step is to identify what silos have been created and what gaps still remain between IT and the business units. Then, develop the strategy for how to best fill these gaps and build bridges to the future state. Lastly, it is important to understand what the urgency, risk and effort for each initiative is.
To drive toward these desired results, we developed three tools to adapt to the new paradigm:
1. Infrastructure services heat map
This is a four-dimensional view of capabilities in the infrastructure services that highlights gaps and opportunities. The four dimensions are:
- Layers: Datacenter, Network, Compute & Storage, Services that drive technology specializations.
- The systemic qualities: Availability, Security, Performance, Economics and Change (ASPEC) that drive more cross functional requirements
- The three legs of the ability and speed to succeed: People, Process and Technology
- The measure of ability: This includes visibility and the ability to see, measure and the ability to set a baseline metric and measure yourself against that, and control and the ability of affect that metric in the desired direction.
2. Gap analysis
Based on the heat map we develop a gap analysis on all 3 legs of abilities (People Process and Technology). Each row listing a challenge, with the associated gap/risk and a proposed remediation. This information drives the roadmap, which is based on the third key tool.
3. Remediation risk analysis
This is a visualization of the proposed remediation initiatives organized by timing (asap, short term, medium and long term), potential (positive) impact, level of effort and risk to the system.
Once this three-step process is complete you will have a roadmap for what organizational, procedural and technology adjustments will be needed to enable a new cloud paradigm, with a managed risk profile and a well understood level of effort.
Author:
Edward Wustenhoff 2020