IT organizations face several challenges: a globalizing economy, the increasing cost of IT ownership, business users directly going to public Cloud providers, the difficulty of operating complex environments, effectively enabling innovation as well as variety of risks around security and compliance.  Given these challenges, IT decision makers must innovate and conduct business differently in order to remain effective. Data shows that despite years of IT cost reduction programs, the industry on average has only managed to shift an additional 1% of IT spend towards growth and innovation.

Does transforming your IT mean moving from a cost center to a business enabler? Changing your architecture to include Cloud? Redesigning applications or selecting off-the-shelf application? Or moving from a centralized IT delivery to IT services broker? A majority of business leaders have said "yes" to all of the above.

Hence, IT Transformation initiatives aren't just about cutting costs or charging back for IT services. They are about faster time to market, higher quality of IT services with increased efficiency and boosting business value that flows from IT. Understanding both the Enterprise environment, as well as, your organization's management goals that should help in planning for business services using IT and Data architectures are great ways to lean towards a successful IT transformation .

There is no question that businesses of all sizes are beginning to see the value in IT transformation, and are in many ways incentivized to begin their transformation journey now. However, if businesses are too quick to begin the IT transformation process without properly establishing a plan that assesses both their Enterprise Environment and sets the correct management goals for their organization, they could find themselves in a counterproductive situation. In my next blog I will dive deeper into how to understand your Enterprise Environment and the management goals that align with your organization's overall IT Transformation efforts.

Reference Links

• The Business and Technology Case for Infrastructure Modernization
• What is network convergence all about?
• Transforming IT Sinkholes into Gold Mines