Management of IT is on the verge of crisis

The fluent overview of trends most of which of Chief information officers faces is capable to drive into a depression anyone with the big IT budget. Today Chief information officers face the growing rate of changes in a landscape of IT, at the same time losing control over computing environment. The quantity of assets which it should be managed grows at explosive rates. Thin setup, virtualization, cloud computing, software as service (SaaS), mobility, all this on several orders complicates work on management of IT.

The vast majority of Chief information officers are not ready to cope with questions of management of the IT environment today. The companies try to throw into this breakthrough of "managers" or "consultants", but then find out that those are confused.

Of course, acceptance of these calls is not something impossible, but everything will be solved not without huge efforts and complete reconsideration of a management system for information technologies. The future management crisis of IT is expressed by the fact that the CEOs and heads of IT will underestimate the happening changes and will try to solve them without due efforts. Most the companies only after such failure approach will get to hard work on creation of a new image of IT.

This new image in accuracy will correspond to the sphere of the industry and the business. It will be subject to influence of the user, and it is managed in such degree what is not represented possible now. Partially it will be created by vendors, but an ideal form should be found by each Chief information officer after they cease "rest against technology" and to them distinguished understanding of the enterprise which they service will come.

Such conclusions are drawn by Dan Woods, the technical director of CITO Research. He emphasizes scale of problems most of which of Chief information officers faces and describes several ways of management crisis of IT.

According to him, in the first case, the IT will get out of hand and will get under pressure of "user preference" of IT. End users and departments will select for themselves the equipment, the software as service (SaaS) and other cloud resources, and in general will bypass IT functions when understand - what suits them. Here the IT monopoly comes to an end, but there is a need to ensure safety, reliability, compliance and also integration which is absent. The majority of efforts for such setup is long in time and the choice, but is short in understanding of that fact that the obligation and responsibility of structures of IT for management of these resources did not get to anywhere.

In the second case, the software as service (SaaS) represents a call, similar to "the user tuning". At worst end users just registrate applications of SaaS and start their use without consultation with personnel of IT. Similar approach leaves unresolved security issues, reliability, integration. At emergence of problems chaos begins.

If IT are involved in this work, each of the SaaS-applications requires attention. The same type of a problem of integration, managements of identification, disaster recovery that earlier arose in ERP, as well as other corporate applications, should be solved also in the field of SaaS. The sphere of this activity is extremely underestimated.

The third - support of mobile employees adds new measurement to all applications of the company. What should be supported by software on mobile devices? How many and what applications should be available? How can the consumer application become a part of an overall picture of IT of the enterprise? What return of investments (ROI) to mobility will be? How many does it have to be invested? On one of these questions there are no definite answers. As soon as it is defined - what should become mobile then it will be necessary to develop management and the application. Most the companies at the beginning of this way.

One more case. Speaking about transition to DPC, Woods notes that their existence does not provide bigger comfort and confidence. He explains it with a large number of the existing applications, servers and other equipment. All these assets require the round-the-clock attention, knowledge of a perspective of applications and actions of personnel in the course of detection of the idle programs and servers devouring energy empty. According to him, today only commands of DPC of Google, Amazon and Salesforce can cope with a cycle of similar tasks. The majority of other data processing centers in the world of it cannot do.

But it is possible, the biggest problem which the IT faces today, according to Woods, imperfect practice of accounting is. Any chief financial officer who is offered to approve expenses on cloud resources will have to ask a simple question: "How many this work on our servers will cost?".

Public cloud resources are followed by the accurate calculations showing how much is use of this or that set of assets. IT departments have neither skills, nor tools for creation of such detailed representation. And not to correct it quickly. Creation of the IT model is a multidimensional task. Time is necessary for understanding and ability: define the total costs of a broad spectrum of services of calculations. And without such information the IT department will be blind when case reaches making decision on implementation of SaaS version of applications, construction of new DPC, creation of private "cloud" or use of resources of public "clouds".

Whether crisis it, asks a question Woods, and itself answers: "In my opinion, for most the enterprises, the answer to this question is clear – yes". Serious crisis as Chief information officers seldom become innovators and leaders in use of new ways and technologies of effective support of strategy, product differentiation and services of the companies. Management crisis of IT is shown also that time for innovations and leadership is constantly clamped. This problem is not new. Sad reality, according to Woods, is that this old problem that "everything can be much worse". But, those who will manage to overcome everything listed will achieve a lot of bigger for the companies.