time to revisit & rejuvenate your it4it strategy

© Conceptualized and Published by Aditya Dashora

Current Paradigms in Information

Technology (IT) and relevance of IT4IT

Reference Architecture

A d i t y a D a s h o r a

Time to Revisit &

Rejuvenate your IT4IT

Strategy

TIME TO REVISIT & REJUVENATE YOUR IT4IT STRATEGY ADITYA DASHORA

1

Aditya dashora, a senior

consultant from Infosys

Limited is an IT

Enthusiast with around

9 years of experience in

delivering many IT

Service Management

consulting projects for

large enterprises across

the globe.

Aditya is quite

passionate about helping

CIOs and CTOs in

improving their IT

Strategy to meet the

current and future

demands. Also, he is

instrumental in

exploring and defining

new ways of working for

the organizations by

leveraging technology.

Aditya is based out of

Bangalore, India.

Contact Information:

[email protected]

https://www.linkedin.com/in/a

dityadashora

ABOUT THE

AUTHOR

mailto:[email protected]

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adityadashora





2

Table of Contents Executive Summary ................................................................................................................. 3

What is IT4IT? .......................................................................................................................... 4

What modern day businesses are looking for? ..................................................................... 5

Where is the bottleneck? .......................................................................................................... 7

The Open Group IT4IT Reference Architecture ................................................................... 8

Where to start? ......................................................................................................................... 9

When and how will I realize the benefits? ..............................................................................11

Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................12

References ................................................................................................................................13


3 Executive Summary

Executive Summary The relationship between IT (Information Technology) & Business has been evolving rapidly. Majority of the businesses today are making huge investments in “Innovation” and “Research” to move ahead of the competition and IT is said to be the center of this innovation. The role of CIO Organization or IT Organization is being elevated from being a mere support function to an enabler and now a strategic asset and center of innovation. The decade of 90s was the era of "Software Development" and the role of IT in those days was to write code to reduce manual work. Last decade (the 2000s) was the time of IT Infrastructure transformation and global growth of Internet and related technologies. And the decade we are in today, is said to be the era of SMAC (Social Media, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud) and because of SMAC, IT has become an integral part of our daily lives (professional and personal). Therefore, the CIOs are being continuously asked for driving the research and innovation and eventually add more value to the business by making best use of IT Capabilities.

Along with SMAC, there are few other trends like DevOps, Automation & BYOD which are not new terms but gaining a lot of momentum now a days. And then we have these futuristic technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), 3D Printing etc. which is conceptual at this point but will be a reality in near future. All the examples and data shown here are clearly indicating that IT has got a bigger role to play in near future and therefore the three pillars of IT namely “People”, “Process” and “Technology” need to gear up for this new IT wave. In this write up, I have tried to highlight the significance of IT Tools (also known as IT4IT) in running and managing IT shop and importance of standardizing IT4IT to support the current and future IT needs.


4 What is IT4IT?

What is IT4IT? IT4IT means a set of IT Tools being used for running and managing IT. The word “IT4IT” which is

abbreviation of IT for IT, is coined by The Open Group. It simply means that what IT does for business,

IT4IT does for IT. You might be wondering that why all of the sudden, I am giving so much importance to

IT Tools? Well the answer is, the kind of importance IT is gaining in today’s world certainly requires us to

relook at many of the IT service delivery aspects and see whether they are ready to support the future

technology needs. IT tooling or IT4IT is one such traditionally ignored area which is going to play a critical

role in coming years.

Interestingly, the IT Staff clearly understands the importance of IT4IT, however due to the evolving role

of IT, IT4IT is demanding more attention from larger community of stakeholders, then what is given today.

Below are few of the examples to show the need of IT4IT:

How can ,Facebook and Amazon of the worlds with 100,000s of servers and millions of users have better

IT Availability, Reliability and Security infrastructure then a large retailer with relatively smaller IT

Landscape, could not protect a security breach which cost them 150 MN? A bank with best in class

products from HP, IBM and Microsoft cannot standardize the Architecture, Design, Requirement and

Development processes while smaller companies with all open source tools can do it. There can be many

valid reasons and perspectives that readers can bring in but, a common challenge across the all customers

from different sectors that I have worked in last couple of years was absence of required focus on IT4IT.

If we just take a step back and think about it, all the time and money that CIO Organizations have spent in

best practices/frameworks/standards (i.e. ITIL, COBIT, PRINCE, ISO, CMMI etc.), Technology

Transformation and service improvement initiatives have fallen short of expectations. The gap between

"Run the Business" and "Change the Business" organizations is still huge.

Around 65% of the IT Budgets are still spent on "Run the business"

and therefore an average organization doesn’t really focus on

innovation or trying something new with IT.

Few years back, the expectations from IT were comparatively simpler - maximum availability, maximum

stability and minimum risk. The key focus was on having a stable and reliable IT Environment which can

help the business to run smoothly. It was believed that every business has different IT needs and

everybody doesn’t need to go for the latest and greatest technologies. But in today's world, this

philosophy is quite debatable. Today, businesses can turn around their fate by making right use of IT. Even

if that involves a certain level of risk taking, business are open to that.

Although CIOs were traditionally hired to focus on operations and

cost reduction, the need for an organization to drive innovation has

created a critical new role for CIOs: focused on strategy and

growth. CIOs are uniquely positioned to develop and drive

innovation, influence cultural change, and deliver the innovation

strategy. They need to have the talent and skills to be forward-


5 What is IT4IT?

looking and visionary— they need to be collaborative individuals

who understand the business. The role of the CIO must evolve from

being the chief information officer to being the chief innovation

officer – PwC Report on How to drive innovation and business

growth

What modern day businesses are looking for? It is rather a difficult question to answer but thanks to my profession that requires me to interact with

many customers and consultants of various sectors. Every sector is coming up with unique and challenging

demands for IT, but something that cuts across all the sectors is the “Speed” and “Innovation". Every

business now a days is looking for faster delivery of the IT Services and innovative solutions to support the

business needs, without compromising too much on quality. CIOs on the one hand have to manage the

existing legacy systems that are not ready for this high speed delivery model and at the same time must

find a solution for this new high speed IT demand. As a result, a part of the business that is badly needing

the “Speed” is ready to create its own mini IT Organization. Therefore CIOs have to pull up the socks

finding out a way to manage both the elephant (traditional IT) and rabbit (the futuristic IT). This approach

is also known as Two Speed IT. IT4IT in this context, is going to play a critical role by providing a single

platform for running and managing both legacy systems and modern IT like mobility, digitalization, cloud

etc.

Below are few examples of what modern day businesses are looking for:

Banks are looking for standardization and legacy modernization and at the same time faster

development and release cycles for their online banking solutions. Also, technologies like Contactless

Payments and Mobile Banking require high availability and reliability of the underlying

infrastructure

Retailers are generating lot of new ideas and strategies to attract customer to the stores or e-stores

and therefore expect the underlying applications to be updated frequently. Retailers are also

investing time and money in studying buying patterns of different customers which requires heavy

usage of analytics. Retailers have to deal with large number of employees/ contractors etc. so they

are looking for robust BYOD setup as well

Manufacturing Industry is playing big bat on big data and analytics in trying to strengthen their

supply chain and global market reach. Many of the manufacturers have also started exploring and

investing into 3D printing to reduce the production cycle time and design defects.

Oil and Gas Industry is looking for improving stability and production value by digitalizing oil fields.

They want to apply the concepts of big data and analytics to real-time production monitoring

systems. They want more predictability and automation in both upstream and downstream

businesses

Hi-tech companies are looking for providing innovative offering using the Cloud concepts at the

lowest subscription cost. They want to use their existing technology investments to create new

solutions and extend their reach to household consumers.


6 What is IT4IT?

On the whole, every industry is re-inventing something around the futuristic technologies as part of their

long term IT Strategy and therefore it is the right time for CIOs to start preparing their IT Shops for this

technology revamping journey for next 5 years. IT4IT Architecture would be an important milestone in

this journey.

Industry analysts often use the Netflix vs. Blockbuster video story

as a case study for Cloud Computing. I would rather say that it is a

solid evidence of what IT is capable of doing in today's world. It was

the right IT strategy that changed the fate of an internet based

video streaming company with 2000 employee to a multi-billion

dollar business and destroyed a 25 years old video retailer chain

with 900 stores and 60000 employees. There are many more stories

like this but the underlying fact remains the same as IT can change

the fate if being used strategically.


7 Where is the bottleneck?

Where is the bottleneck? As once said by famous Chinese general Sun Tzu, “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will

not be imperiled in a hundred battles.”

In case of IT as far as I know, we are knowing the enemies or the problems very well. The problems are

rapidly changing business needs, increasing expectations from IT and complexity of legacy systems. If I say

that there is nothing has been done to address these long standing problems, then I would be wrong

because CIO organizations have a long history of IT service improvement projects where we tried our

hands on all kind of frameworks, best practices, guidelines and standards etc. All of these have offered

some great stuff around process improvement, cost saving, maturity, agility etc. Despite of all these, IT is

still not able to overpower its enemies. It implies that there is something we have been ignoring for long

and that is strategizing the investments in IT4IT and a reference guideline to help in selecting right IT tools.

In absence of any reference guidelines in IT4IT, organizations end up buying best in class IT Tools from

leading vendors like HP, IBM, Microsoft etc. and later struggle to streamline the “IT Service - concept to

realize” pipeline. These tools used to create some level of dependency or vendor lock-in which forces IT

teams to stick to those vendors and tools for years without looking for alternatives.

This year, The Open Group introduced “IT4IT Reference Architecture” and it is gaining a lot of attention

from various IT Leaders and Analysts. The Open Group IT4IT Reference Architecture is a step in the

direction, to provide required IT tooling architecture guidelines and standards for designing and

implementing IT4IT Architecture. The Open Group IT4IT Reference Architecture is based on “IT Value

Chain” approach to provide complete transparency on the flow of artefacts and data between different

processes and tools. It will also clearly articulate the inputs, outputs, triggers and dependencies between

different teams and functions. The Open Group IT4IT Reference Architecture is well aligned with popular

frameworks like ITIL, TOGAF, and COBIT etc. and therefore it complements the process standardization

initiatives as well.

Traditional methods for creating an IT4IT Reference Architecture

in the IT management domain are oriented around processes,

capabilities, and technology implementations. Unfortunately,

processes can be implemented differently for each IT

organizational archetype and capabilities are largely influenced by

technology implementations. As a result, this architecture

approach often results in a complex mesh of products and solutions

requiring countless point-to-point integrations to accommodate the

variations in process. – The Open Group IT4IT Reference

Architecture 1.3

It is interesting to know that IT4IT Reference Architecture doesn’t completely follow the traditional

process based architecture approach and rather uses IT Value Chain approach. The reason is by following

process based architecture approach, practitioners often end up buying tools for automating the

processes as silos and not unlocking the full potential of IT Tools. IT4IT Reference Architecture allows

practitioners to make right IT tooling choices in by using IT Value Chain approach that focuses on the

overall value of IT to the business and not just value of individual processes.


8 Where is the bottleneck?

Recently, I came across an example of tool driven process improvement. In traditional Software

Engineering or Product Engineering processes, there was no specific guidelines on Continuous Integration

(CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). A few years back, when few futuristic open source tools and key

vendors like IBM, CA started offering this functionality in their SDLC Tools, it naturally attracted the

practitioners relook at the Build and Release Management processes and accommodate CI/CD as a normal

practice.

The Open Group IT4IT Reference Architecture As mentioned in previous section, IT4IT Reference Architecture uses IT Value Chain approach to create a

model of the activities that IT performs to deliver services. The primary value streams in this value chain

are: a) Strategy to Portfolio (S2P), b) Requirement to Deploy (R2D), c)Request to Fulfill (R2F) & d)Detect

to Correct(D2C). The IT4IT Reference Architecture provides a prescriptive framework to support the value

chain-based IT operating model and service-centric management ecosystem.

IT4IT Reference Architecture approach for the IT Value Chain is anchored by four pillars – the service

model, the information model, the functional model, and the integration model. It allows IT to achieve

the same level of business predictability and efficiency that supply chain management has allowed for the

business, and was designed by practitioners to be industry, product, and vendor-independent.

Figure 1- Image courtesy - The Open Group IT4IT™ Reference Architecture, Version 1.3 © The Open Group

Earlier, the IT4IT or IT Management Tools were relevant only to

foot-solders like Developers, Testers, Support Staff, and Commend

Center Technicians etc. But now, these tools have gained a lot more

relevance in terms of alignment with the overall IT and Business

Roadmap of an organization. What value a particular tool can bring

into the organization is not just a matter of discussion between Dev

Manager and Vendor. It is equally important to CIO's Office and

Service Provider as well. And therefore the selection,

implementation, integration, management and ROI of IT

Management Tools are critical activities and eventually become

success criteria of IT4IT Architecture.


9 Where to start?

Where to start? There can be multiple ways to start the IT4IT transformation journey. It can start as a completely fresh

initiative or can piggy back on existing technology re-platforming or cloud initiatives. It can also be started

as a natural next step to process improvement projects.

The foundation activity of IT4IT Transformation Project is to develop an IT Value Chain. The IT Value chain

can be developed using various industry standards like SWEBOK, ITIL, TOGAF or The Open Group IT4IT

Reference Architecture. A good understanding of Lean Management philosophy also helps in designing IT

Value Chain. The only ground rule is to design end-to-end IT Value Chain and not silo processes. The next

step is to do the detailed cataloging or inventory of existing toolset and mapping to IT Value Chain and

underlying components like capabilities, technology supportability and platform or OS compatibility.

The next step is to identify tooling choices for the future. To do that, organizations can consider using five

basic parameters: Capabilities, Total Cost of Ownership, Integrate-ability, Vendor's roadmap and

Organization's IT direction. Depending upon the customer's preferences, these parameters can be

prioritized or modified. By scanning the existing tools and industry leading tools through these

parameters, we arrive at the potential candidates for future IT Tooling Landscape. These candidates, may

include some of the existing tools, few new tools and more than one tools of similar capabilities. In order

to narrow down the tooling choices and firm up our judgment, we need to interview the practitioners

(e.g. developers, testers, business analysts etc.) to understand their current challenges, tool usage

statistics, the quality of deliverables and time they are spending in each phase of project lifecycle etc. This

data will help us in confirming or correcting our decisions tooling choices and also in preparing right use-

case and roadmap for onboarding new tools in the environment. At this point, we may prepare a high

level migration and decommissioning strategy for subsequent discussions with relevant stakeholders.

Now comes the most challenging activity - recommending the tooling choices to the user community and

prepare them for the “change”. There are many technical and operations challenges organization may

face in this activity. But the key challenge here is that the users are emotionally attached to the tools

because the tool is the one that helps them in doing their job. They are typically least bothered about the

processes or best practices but the tools. So the uphill task is to convince people for discontinuing on

existing tools and start using new tools because that will bring more value to the organization. I have

heard lot of people reacting to our recommendations by saying "it’s a fortune cookie wisdom" or "it

sounds like a fairy tale to me. Don’t waste my time”. There is no single point solution to this situation. All

I can say is, it has to be handled it both ways - Top Down and Bottom Up. Having a good migration and

decommissioning strategy also helps in these conversations.

It is always recommended that Tools Transformation projects must

not start before process improvement projects. Ideally it should

start afterwards or alongside.

Finally, to bring in the change, few early adopter projects must be identified. The projects can be less

critical, internal kind of projects that can survive the flux of the change. After successful early adoption,

like any transformation project, a phase-wise rollout plan must be introduced after getting consensus

from all the stakeholders. I have also seen few organizations investing in experience lab setup before


10 Where to start?

introducing the tools to the projects. By doing that, they can reduce the onboarding time and make it

smoother. The experience lab setup must done in shortest timeframe with minimum investment. (E.g. In

public cloud using demo licenses)


11 When and how will I realize the benefits?

When and how will I realize the benefits? I am sure by now, this question must have come to your mind multiple times. And the answer that I have

is not going to excite you too much. The answer is "it will take time". To help you understand this better,

I can break down the benefits into two parts: A) benefits of improved tool set (short term) & b) benefits

of integrated tool set (long term)

A. Benefits of improved toolset are rework avoidance due to output quality improvement; reducing

interaction time by standardization of information; saving time by reusability. These benefits can

be realized in short term, say 6-12 months. The key impact factor would be reduction in rework due

to standardized toolset which enforces quality controls. Also, every function or group (developers,

testers, business analysts etc.) should be able to understand some language because of this

standardization. This in turn will reduce meeting times, long email threads, last minute hick ups in

production and will increase the culture of reusability amongst the engineers. Another important

aspect is, with the help of standard tool set, the auditability of processes or functions will be

improved. For example: tracking requirement using MS Word or Excel vs. standard tools like IBM

Doors or HP ALM. We may not see many cost savings in short term because of the upfront

investment done to standardize the toolset.

B. Benefits of integrated toolset are smooth information flow and faster delivery due to rapid

information exchange; defect reduction by early feedback; overall quality improvement and more

innovation. These benefits can be realized in 1-2 years’ timeframe and eventually will become a

status quo. The key impact factor here would be reducing people dependency by seamless flow of

quality information and learning system based learnings to introduce optimization and innovation.

The other key impact would be readiness towards future of IT which is SMAC, DevOps, Automation,

IoT etc. CIOs and other managers would certainly realize increasing benefits year on year. Initially it

might be of few dollars by the third or fourth year, it would be significant enough to influence IT

budgets. Eventually the real win for any CIO would be to show the reduction in “Run” cost and

increase in “Change” cost specifically towards innovation and transformation.

To achieve these benefits, there is some upfront investment required to run the IT4IT Program and

establish a Tooling Ecosystem. So the overall benefit in the longer run can be understood by the curve

below:

Figure 2- IT4IT Cost Benefit Sample Chart


12 Conclusion

Conclusion Rationalization, optimization and integration of IT4IT can establish a strong foundation for re-building IT

as a strategic asset then being a cost center. On one hand, it paves the way for DevOps kind of setup for

the IT Organization while it also brings in lot of agility and standardization in the whole IT Org including

vendors, partners and IT Staff. In the new elevated role of IT, no organization wants to get into vendor

lock-in type of situation and IT4IT Standardization will simply eliminate that. A proper IT4IT Architecture

will also ensure that all the investment on IT Tools is bringing expected value in the organization.

Acknowledgement and Adoption of The Open Group IT4IT Reference Framework would be the first step

in this direction and therefore CIOs must start looking into this, if haven't done yet.


13 References

References 1. The Open Group IT4IT Reference Architecture

(http://www.opengroup.org/IT4IT)

2. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT4IT_Forum)

3. ITIL 2011 Guidelines (https://www.axelos.com/itil)

4. KPMG White Paper on Reinventing IT to support digitalization

(http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/reinventing_it_to_su

pport_digitization)

5. PwC White Paper on How to Drive Innovation and Business Growth

(https://www.kpmg.com/US/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Docu

ments/driving-business-value-through-it-performance.pdf)

http://www.opengroup.org/IT4IT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT4IT_Forum

https://www.axelos.com/itil

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/reinventing_it_to_support_digitization

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/reinventing_it_to_support_digitization

https://www.kpmg.com/US/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Documents/driving-business-value-through-it-performance.pdf

https://www.kpmg.com/US/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Documents/driving-business-value-through-it-performance.pdf

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