Making IT Operations efficient. 5 Steps.
If it hasn’t happened in your company yet, there is a strong likelihood that it will. CIO / IT budget cut, that is. Unless of course the company is cash rich and there is no investor (or shareholder) pressure. The IT budgets were up earlier this year. I remember both Forrester and IDC mentioning about 5% increase in IT budgets overall. That joy didn’t last long as the global environment changed. The economic slow down crept in, and the pandemic hit.
The previous years have not been too bad for IT departments though bereft of radical rises in budget. But now the same adage of “do more with less” is back. The need for being creative, strategic and more efficient is back. Though, one would think these behaviours should be secular and not cyclical and consider that it isn’t really about low cost but more about cost optimal.
Our experience says there are many different mechanisms, but they can be overall bucketed under the following five heads.
Question the As-Is
There are no holy cows, everything should be up for a scrutiny to coax optimal performance from the incumbents. Whether that is the set of core or high usage applications or the infrastructure that they sit on. Even the architecture that exists. How about the licensing costs, the services contracts? Is there some elbow room there? You would notice that I use the word “optimal”, and deliberately so. Because, over squeezing often has a side-effect elsewhere, often in quality (of delivery, service or product).
Infrastructure Efficiency
What a CIO does to bring about infrastructure efficiency depends, of course, on where her shop is in terms of antiquity. The standard advice, and appropriate in most cases, is to either embark (or continue) on a cloud journey.
The Flexera ‘State of the Cloud report‘, from last month states interesting pieces of information, which are worth being aware of. The gist is that not only is the movement towards cloud almost a given, if a company wants to take advantage of technology and be competitive, but the movement has actually accelerated during this pandemic. Gradually, to take advantage of the available eco-system, companies have started moving high value tasks to the cloud instead of just the commodity (data or computing) tasks. One, of course, still needs to be judicious of what load gets migrated to the cloud without neglecting the cost factor.
Modernization infrastructure implies investments, albeit to help avoid costs in the medium to longer term, and definitely open up further options. Even if remaining completely on-premise is appropriate for you, and it could be, moving your legacy core applications to newer non-monolithic architecture must be a ‘no-brainer’.
Operational Efficiency – automation
One can choose to consider this in two different way. Making what is on the ground (today) more efficient, or re-imagining how work could be done completely differently.
The first is taking a close look at the operational IT processes, making process improvements and introducing automation.
The other is to reimagine the work, change the way of doing it though keeping the objectives still the same. Among others, this might mean introduction of DevOps, DataOps and Agile as the practices and methodologies of operating on a day-to-day basis.
People Efficiency
Managing people under new circumstances, a new environment is already a new challenge. The skillsets needed now onwards are different. Should what the above mentioned three elements were to be considered, the skill sets required will be at a higher level. The idea is also to let automation handle the mundane, and humans consider the higher skill tasks. This, surely, opens the discussion for a new people strategy but the base certainly is to seek the right talent, and build the appropriate culture (to ensure appropriate CIO strategy alignment) that will be required now onwards to make and keep your IT shop efficient.
Efficiency as an Objective
The above mentions a series of steps, but how about placing the quest for efficiency at the forefront and part of our being? Make it the “new normal”. A few things are required to make this work. Besides introducing, say Design Thinking principles, there has to be some money kept aside for prototyping and proofs of concept, and that the organization support must be available. The best way to encourage people to go this route perhaps is inserting the required parameters into their KPIs and reward performance. In short, there is some restructuring required in the way of working, and support required to bring the newness to reality.
None this is really easy in terms of implementation, but not esoteric in concept. Each of these elements have been put into practice before, in normal circumstances, by people, perhaps not at the same time. But, these are not normal circumstances, and surely does need you Ms CIO to step up a whole lot.
Are you a CIO staring at an imminent budget cut or just wanting your shop to become more efficient by investing wisely? 3nayan would love to hear from you.
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