Walking Through the Minefield
Ryan advises that businesses seeking to adopt an IT operating model need to tread carefully. CIOs, for example, should be cautious when re-arranging the workload of IT techs and administrators. "There's a big demand for IT people out there," he says. "If you start playing with people's careers they'll just move to a competitor."There may be some opposition from the boardroom as well, although in Ryan's experience, the business end of an organization tends to embrace the model. "They very quickly come to terms with it," he says, noting CEOs and other executives soon realize the potential savings and efficiency increases that can arise from adopting the model.
"It's also treating IT as a business, and as a business unit, so business people very quickly realize, 'IT sells products and services, and this is how they're going to sell it, and this is how they're going to interact with me'," he says.
However, adapting such a model means making structural and operational changes that may not be welcomed by executives disinclined to return to a centralized model of IT. "There are certain scenarios where IT probably hasn't done well by the business in the past," Ryan says. "Based on that, particular business units or the business overall has decided to create its own IT capabilities."
He notes one of the major challenges of adopting such a model lies in "determining how many of those IT capabilities you leave in the business unit, and how much goes back to a centralized group. That, obviously, frankly involves a lot of politics. You're carving up part of your world - should you do that, is it a good thing to lose?"
Ultimately though, an IT operating model can benefit business executives the most. "This is all about IT getting its act together and being a better provider to the business," Ryan says. "We're not redefining the way a business operates, we're actually redefining the IT shop to better interact with how a business operates."
Indeed, given the emphasis on transforming IT departments to be more responsive to the business end of an organization, it could be argued that it is the CIOs' turf being invaded here. But according to Ryan, CIOs generally accept that the changes the model brings are beneficial.
"Most of the CIOs I operate with at the higher levels appreciate the need to be more effective and more efficient," he says. "They look good when the business is happy, because they're essentially an internal service provider.
"If they're prioritizing projects right, if they're providing the right level of support, if they're making their spend visible, if they're actually helping to cut costs around sourcing and interaction, they're going to look like heroes."
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