Tuesday | 2 December, 2008
From Marginalized to Virtualized
Weighed down by data, IT isn’t moving at business-speed and is being treated like the fat boy no one wants on the basketball squad. Virtualization can get you back on the team.
According to ESG Research's November 2007 study: E-Discovery Requirements Escalate, in the archive/e-discovery/litigation support market only 7 per cent of the time does IT make the decision to use funds to build out infrastructure, tools, applications and processes to support e-discovery mandates, whereas 37 per cent of the time the legal department makes those decisions -- with no involvement upfront from IT at all. Examples such as this are becoming more common as unknown business unit requirements continue to appear -- causing an increased rift between an already tenuous relationship involving the core business and internal IT.
The results aren't good. They are bad for business, but to facilitate change, we must acknowledge and understand the realities within the cycle.
The reality of this is that IT is already operating above capacity. The business unit views IT's inflexibility and time to service delays as unacceptable, and as such begins to make decisions independently of IT. The businesses may gain accelerated time to deployment of the new application, but has little knowledge of the fact that they may be causing more damage than good overall.
I worry about the inevitable long-term effects of this cycle, but recognize that most will not have the time or luxury to concern themselves with such things. In the short term, IT is being further removed from the decision-making process for business unit information access decisions. The result is that IT ends up having to support the goals of the business unit, but it has no control or a limited amount of control over the decision processes and the effects of those decisions on IT's overall ability to deliver services.
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