McKinsey’s latest global survey on business technology shows a challenging dichotomy – IT is more strategic than ever to businesses, but IT shortcomings are more acute.
How do you do more with less?
It is great news that business executives believe that IT can make a difference, but with it comes expectations that corporate IT will deliver the kind of services that consumer grade cloud and mobile applications offer them outside of the office. The rising bar that business stakeholders place on IT is one of the biggest challenges that face IT operations management.
McKinsey notes that 64% of executives say their budgets for new investments will increase next year, up from 55% in 2012, though they are evenly split on whether operational spending will increase or decrease. Executives also expect IT to spend less on infrastructure and more on innovation and analytics. It makes sense that they want to invest more in core business applications. But less investment in infrastructure doesn't mean that managing new and existing infrastructure gets a break.
How do you do “more with less” while meeting the escalating business pressure on IT?
- Align to the business. Seems like an obvious statement, but can you manage your IT infrastructure using a service-oriented lens? Can you monitor for SLA breach thresholds and map IT elements to the business applications and services that they affect? Report IT performance in a business relevant way to tie IT operations and investments closer to the critical business functions that they enable.
- Optimize your tools. Costs will continue to mount from managing legacy infrastructure with complex enterprise footprint tools and investing in point solutions. If “rip and replace” of your IT operations management tools is unrealistic, find a solution that integrates with multiple point tools so that you have one interface to manage across platforms.
- Save time. In the survey, the number of IT respondents who said that their organization was effective in managing the IT infrastructure decreased 14%. Look for IT operations management platforms with broad technology integration across your IT elements and vendors – take your people out of multiple management tools to do their job. Increase your limited people resources productivity to free more time to spend on IT projects aligned with strategic business initiatives.
OpsRamp can help you meet these needs and more with an IT operations management solution that delivers IT operations lifecycle management capabilities spanning physical, virtual, cloud and application elements. Contact OpsRamp today to learn more.
