EMA has been both predicting and advocating a more service-centric model for asset optimization and planning for nearly a decade. This is also, in itself, not a new idea with EMA either. The telecommunications industry and best practices such as the Telecommunication Management Forum’s eTOM guidelines support the logically obvious assumption that if a technology organization’s “products” are its “services,” then all assets (capex and opex) should ideally be planned and optimized to support the delivery of superior services.
This logical idea, however, has been largely disregarded by many IT organizations – even when they pay superficial lip service to it. There are many reasons for this, chief among them the fact that most IT organizations have historically been staffed, managed and run on what EMA calls an “academic model.” This model is defined by skill groups that tend to work in siloed isolation of each other, and are often protective of “turf ” much in the way academic departments fight for support across a common university budget.
This is a territorial model for cost allocation in which IT as a whole becomes a “territory to be defended” against the slights of technology-ignorant business and organizational professionals. Conversely, IT can sometimes be held up as a shining light of innovation without apparent accountability – although for good reason, this is becoming increasingly rare.
There are other reasons for this gap blocking true service-centric asset management within most IT organizations. The most notable among these is the fact that no technology vendor has yet offered fully integrated solutions to support all the implications of service-centric asset management in which, to take just one example, mobile devices, PCs and telecommunications resources, as well as the broader, cross-domain IT infrastructure, can be collectively modeled, analyzed and understood in context with service portfolio requirements for governance and performance.
And finally, a third reason for the gap has been what might be best called “a failure to establish a common language.” IT’s “territorial model” has often been met by its business counterparts with an understandable reluctance to grapple with new technologies of unfathomable complexity magnified by acronymic anguish.
The fact is, however, that all these things are changing. Roadblocks in organizational culture, technology, and to a lesser extent language, are bit by bit being removed so that asset and service planning can come together not only within IT, but also between IT and the business and organization it serves.
One of these factors – what I once called a “perverse catalyst” – is Cloud Computing – which is, according to EMA data from “Service-centric Asset Management in the Age of Cloud Computing,” EMA, February, 2011. In this data 70% see cloud computing as making asset management more service centric and 89% see cloud computing as making asset management more cross domain!
EMA Webinar on March 8: Service-Centric Asset Management in the Age of Cloud Computing
Related Links:
EMA Report: Service-Centric Asset Management in the Age of Cloud Computing
