IT Operations Organization Innovation

Gartner research paper “Foster Innovation Within Your IT Operations Organization” states that “Most IT operations organizations are not natural homes for innovation. With the current high levels of change in technology, business and society, it is essential for them to become more innovative to remain viable.” It further states that “IT operations organizations are not traditionally known as fountains of innovation, and current incentive systems may in fact encourage the wrong behavior. What makes this situation potentially perilous is that many of IT's customers now have more options, such as the public cloud for the hosting of their services.”

Indeed traditional IT is to provide services to the business users, rarely thinking about innovation within the organization. As a matter of fact, which is very true for our organization, many of our IT customers or our business units now have more options to implement IT solution for their business needs without even consulting IT. The reasons behind this behavior are mainly two folds, software vendors now are providing total solution, while organization IT can’t stay up with emerging technology and lack of innovation. Even though from enterprise architecture perspective we try to simplify IT landscape to eliminate and reduce complexity for IT implementation and operation, it is not enough to convince our business customers if we can’t provide solution quick enough with emerging technologies. For IT to survive even within the organization, IT operations need to encourage innovation. In our organization our strategy is to become business solution provider, we emphasize in the following areas for business to buy-in and build trust relationship with customers.

·       Closer operation with our customers

·       Increased effectiveness and speed

·       New and innovative services

·       Enhanced internal alignment and transparency

·       Differentiated services and quality

·       Competitive cost and increased efficiency

Reference

https://www.gartner.com/doc/1803214/overview-foster-innovation-it-operations