How many Businesses are ready to consume IT from a Service Provider? And how many might be better looking for a Service Partner which can transition them and help them transform their IT platform?
There are few enterprises who are ready to consume their IT in the same way that they consume electricity. The technology solutions are near enough there but to realise the actual benefits is going to take partnership.
We are still in the early days of Cloud and Cloud provision and the variety of options along with relative immaturity of both providers and users means that this relationship needs to be one of partnership where both sides put some skin in the game. The technology solutions are near enough there but to realise the actual benefits is going to take partnership.
We are going to have to find new ways of connecting and contracting business in IT; adversarial relationships are going to have to change, moving away from cost, perceived ROI and towards to a true value models.
This is as true for the internal IT supplier as it is for the external IT relationships. One change which might be long overdue is to identify IT consumption metrics and unitise the costs, the internal IT supplier’s role is to ensure that unit cost is as low as possible but not control how many units that the Business consumes. Think enabler as opposed to gatekeeper.
They have a role in advising how to minimise the number of units but not to tell the Business that they cannot use that many units. Too much time is spent haggling with the Business about the cost of provision; it should be simply, you want do ‘X’ and you want to do it that many times/that big/that quickly; this is the cost. Yes, there will always be a sales discussion but really it needs to move on from do everything cheaper.
I think that many are still expecting the consumerisation of Enterprise IT in the form of Cloud will make things cheaper but I do not believe that this is inevitable. It might make things easier and it might make the whole IT process quicker, certainly when trying to deliver at scale with velocity.
The cost of IT units will continue to fall as well but total number of units will increase. Actually if all consumerisation of Enterprise IT does is to reduce costs; it has failed to live up to its promise.
