Very successful adopters
IT organizations that seek cloud with objectives prioritized in terms of improving the range and quality of services first are more likely to be very successful than those that prioritize costs first — not that both don’t factor in, but the patterns here are pretty clear.
Very successful IT organizations are also more likely to have a cross-domain services management organization, with strong executive leadership, as well as a dedicated group focused on cloud or virtualization to support cloud’s unique cross-domain challenges. Perhaps because of politics and heterogeneous architectures in large companies, mid-tier enterprises (5,000 to 20,000 employees) tend to outshine not only smaller companies but, in particular, larger enterprises (20,000+ employees) in a wide range of indicators, including maturity, sophistication of management investments, and progressive use of cloud technologies and services.
And, as mentioned, investing in good service management solutions to support the delivery of business services over cloud really does pay off. Our very successful group was three times more likely to have invested in application dependency mapping, service portfolio planning, and a service management dashboard with advanced analytics. That group was also four times more likely to have invested in run-book automation or ITPA, and CMDB/CMS.
This isn’t to say that just spending money on service management works like an insurance policy. There is always a chicken-and-the-egg question as more mature and progressive IT organizations tend to adopt more advanced service management technologies. But if anyone tells you that investing in solutions to manage cloud is a new Disney theme park with completely new rules tell them to go home, take some medication, and sleep it off.
Dennis Drogseth is VP of Boulder, Colo.-based Enterprise Management Associates, an industry research firm focused on IT management. Dennis can be reached at [email protected].