IT4IT™ – An Open Group Standard for Managing the Business of IT

The changing expectations of IT: Information Technology (IT) as a function in an enterprise has always played a supportive role to meet Business goals. In the past decade, the expectation was reset and IT was expected to play a more active role of being a key enabler for Business capability. The new digital age characterized by smart phones, gadgets, social media and an explosive growth of digital content however, has pushed the bar higher. Most segments of the market across geographies are being influenced by this new digital transformation one way or another. Hence IT capability of an organization is now expected to innovate and not merely limit itself to IT operations. This is a new transition that IT is going through.

In addition to raised expectations, there is an ecosystem of apps and platforms for devices and gadgets that is challenging the capabilities of IT in organizations. Stakeholders constantly draw comparisons. Planned down times and long wait times for features are not seen as acceptable anymore. Changes driven by rapid strides in technology and user experience are likely to come in thick and fast. Every eight years, a new generation comes out expressing its own will and having a say on how the digital economy will move forward. Expectations will continue to be reset every time a giant technological stride is made expanding user experience possibilities or in the reduction of operational cost. Whereas on the concrete side of digital technology, the cost of hardware is going down and its quality getting arguably better. Open source is consolidating on its evolutionary spirals providing a canvas for collaborative work across the globe. These open up several possibilities along with their own set of challenges.

IT Response: To handle these, the IT shop needs to see itself as a services provider with innovation prowess. The traditional paradigm of identifying gaps and proposing projects shall give way to a new paradigm of continuous assessment, continuous integration and continuous delivery. There is a need for full-fledged automation with a strong focus on work execution where outcomes are measurable with full transparency and traceability.  To do this, a meta-model along with various functional components need to be identified and agreed upon by practitioners. IT4IT, a prescriptive reference architecture and an operational model from The Open Group, is a major step in this direction. It is an industry neutral, technology agnostic evolving standard designed not only for existing landscapes but also for future IT paradigms.

IT4IT: IT4IT is based on Porter’s ‘Value Chain’ model. Value chain is a classification scheme for the complete set of primary and supporting activities that contribute to the lifecycle of creating net value of a market offering. It is based on a ‘process view’ of organizations. The standard has five levels. The first three levels are vendor neutral and provide generic views. Levels four and five are detailed vendor specific refinements and solution architecture which is not covered by the standard.

IT value chain consists of primary and supporting activities as shown in the figure below.  Primary activities are core to the IT organization. They are classified under four value streams.

1. Strategy to Portfolio (S2P) – Drive IT portfolio to business innovation
2. Requirement to Deploy (R2D) – Build what the business needs when it needs it
3. Request to Fulfill (R2F) – Catalog, fulfil and manage service usage and
4. Detect to Correct (D2C) – Anticipate and resolve production issues

The supporting activities identified are five in number and include Finance & Assets, Sourcing & Vendor selection, Intelligence & Reporting, Resource & Project, Governance, Risk & Compliance.

These operate in parallel and are not sequential and hence open for adoption of agile methods.

Final thoughts: IT4IT coexists with existing standards such as ITIL and COBIT.  Organizations can use their own evolutionary insights and best practices as a launch pad, evaluate against the reference architecture as to which functions are performed and what kind of data is being captured in their current state. In case of gaps if any, evaluate if there is a good enough rationale for non-compliance or choose to implement the missing elements and derive its full value. While choosing process tools from the market, the architecture helps perform due diligence providing visionary guidance on the end state integration model.

This is in brief about IT4IT. This is an evolving standard following a consortium model of development. Organizations are encouraged to join, make use of the standard and help it evolve and reach its intended objective. More can be found here.

P.S.

I had written this article for an organisation I had the privilege of working for earlier in my career.