Challenges faced by lesser mature IT organizations

In the last couple of years, we see all trends that suggest that management of IT, as a discipline, is on its way to achieving the next level of maturity. Most established (with legacy environment in place) business enterprises that have been using IT in a traditional manner

1. Kept their infrastructure engineering and operations functions somewhat separate from the application development and operations
2. Managed technology and not the business, and
3. Thought, planned and managed in a silo-ed fashion

These business enterprises are now undertaking major transformational and improvement initiatives to bring alignment across different IT components in an effort to achieve the highly envisioned Business-IT Integration benefits. The separation between application and infrastructure resulted in a disconnect between business needs and the end-to-end management of those needs from the fulfillment perspectives – applications teams architected, designed, developed and implemented applications to satisfy functional as well as non-functional application needs, somewhat in a vacuum. When these applications are deployed in production, mismatches happen and these lead to negatively impacting the customer experience with IT products and services.

A close integration between application and infrastructure architecture, engineering, and development is absolutely critical to successfully meeting the business needs in an effective and efficient manner. For example, if an application is designed for a 99% availability driven by business needs, it may not actually be available that long if the network has a lower or same availability level. A global business enterprise deployed a Single-Sign On (SSO) application without thoroughly analyzing the demands and capacity requirements both at application as well as infrastructure levels. When it was put in production, other departments saw the benefits and started migrating to the SSO platform to take advantage of the benefits. Soon after deployment, the SSO platform was supporting over 4000 business applications, which it was never implemented for. Lack of capacity planning in this case resulted in the outage of SSO platform that led to un-availability of all of these business applications and impacted the business bottom-line tremendously. Therefore, if architected in a vacuum, these applications will very likely be mismatches to network and server capacity resulting in unforeseen outages. These outages cause disruptions not only for business customers but also for IT teams. In fact, if not governed and managed appropriately, this can impact the organizational culture to the one where ‘fire-fighting’ is a norm and is, unfortunately, encouraged and rewarded. In financial terms, this results in increasing costs of delivering IT services and reducing productivity and may lead to greater customer dissatisfaction.  

In my next blog, I will discuss in detail the siloed thinking and siloed management that adversely impacts an IT service provider’s ability to enable business processes.