Access to digital technology for the entire population (smartphones, internet, applications) has changed habits and consumption patterns, and consumer uses are becoming the norm, establishing themselves as an essential benchmark in the user experience.
In this context, companies' IT departments are obliged to adapt constantly in order to cope with these new uses, which are often introduced into the company without the approval of IT.
In their quest for innovation and optimisation, business units are looking to digitisation as a response to their challenges, and do not always understand the IT Department's difficulties in aligning itself with their needs in terms of agility and usage.
This creates a real gap in the understanding of each party's challenges and constraints, which tends to slow down projects and hinder the digital transformation of businesses, which is essential to economic growth in a highly competitive environment.
To keep pace with these new consumption patterns, corporate IT teams need to reinvent themselves, drawing on new cloud-based IT service delivery models and establishing more cross-functional governance models, while remaining in line with the company's security, performance and criticality objectives.
IT as a service is emerging as a genuine facilitator in the reconciliation between business and IT. Like a veritable digital toolbox, this model makes it possible to create new environments in record time, while still meeting the company's IT requirements.
This new IT service model, which takes the form of a catalogue of services (infrastructure, managed services, security, etc.), simplifies IT management, freeing it from some of the constraints and technical red tape of a more traditional model.
The IT Department can then focus more on projects and functional requirements, and listen more closely to the business by appointing project managers.
During a discussion with a customer, the IT purchasing director of a major French bank, he gave this overview of the situation:
"As an IT buyer, I regularly find myself at the centre of the debate between the functional needs of the business and the technical needs of the IT teams.
The observation is as follows: business lines are less inclined to understand the constraints inherent in enterprise IT. They are trying to free themselves from traditional validation processes by moving towards SaaS-type models.
In some cases, these new practices entail real risks for the company.
There was an urgent need for new, more operational IT models that aligned the constraints of both parties and offered real economic performance.
On the other hand, cloud-based 'As A Service' models now represent an IT consumption model that I have to systematically consider as part of new projects or the optimisation of existing environments.
Extending the cloud's agile and flexible model to areas such as IT security, or managed services as enabled by the IT as a service offering, has enabled me to cover a wider range of functional needs, in line with the digital strategy, which has made it considerably easier to set up new projects".
Author: Xavier LEFEBVREHead of Direct Sales at Cloud Temple