FORRESTER Organize Your Infrastructure

8/10/2019 FORRESTER Organize Your Infrastructure

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Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USATel: +1 617.613.6000 | Fax: +1 617.613.5000 | www.forrester.com

Organize Your Infrastructure TeamFor Customer Obsessionby Dave Bartoletti, May 22, 2014

For: Infrastructure

& Operations

Professionals

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Consolidated And Hybrid IT Infrastructure Needs A New Organization

Focusing the bulk o your resources on winning, serving, and retaining customers -- the

B agenda -- will require you to think outside your I&O comort zone. But you donthave to start rom scratch. Leverage your consolidated, virtualized, and hybrid cloud

inrastructure to create the services your customers want and need.

Prepare Your I&O Team For The Business Technology Era

Your customers want the best application experiences using any combination o in-house

technology and cloud services. Tey must rely on you as an I&O leader to both decide

which services meet their needs and to configure and optimize them under integration

and economic constraints. Tis is the new technology management value chain.

Prioritize Service Management, Automation, Collaboration, And Cloud

Skills

I&O is a hybrid organization today, combining the skills o technology (inrastructure)

and process (operations) experts. As you evolve to pursue the B agenda, some o these

roles will transer to service providers, while others will be created or expanded. We

describe the most important roles and skills you need today.
http://www.forrester.com/


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FOR INFRASTRUCTURE & OPERATIONS PROFESSIONALS

WHY READ THIS REPORT

Empowered customers are disrupting every industry, and inrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders

must adapt to this new reality. We believe that technology management is in the middle o a new

evolutionary cycle that will transorm I&O rom its traditional role as inrastructure provider to a new

role as a broker and manager o technology services. Tis report explains how to organize your

inrastructure team and describes the most important roles and skills you need to help your business win,

serve, and retain customers.

Table Of Contents

Is Your I&O Organization Ready For The Age

Of The Customer?

The BT Agenda Requires Different Priorities

And Success Metrics

Structure Your I&O Organization To Win,

Serve, And Retain Customers

RECOMMENDATIONS

Dont Wait To Start Building Your BT AgendaSkills Portfolio

Supplemental Material

Notes & Resources

Forrester interviewed 12 user and vendor

companies for this research.

Related Research Documents

Transform Infrastructure And Operations For

The Future Technology Management Cycle

February 13, 2014

Technology Management In The Age Of The

CustomerOctober 10, 2013

The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective DevOps

September 3, 2013

Organize Your Infrastructure TeamFor Customer ObsessionOrganization: The IT Infrastructure Playbook

by Dave Bartoletti

with Laura Koetzle, Sophia I. Vargas, Michael Caputo

2

5

6

13

13

MAY 22, 2014
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Organize Your Infrastructure Team For Customer Obsession 2

2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited May 22, 2014

IS YOUR I&O ORGANIZATION READY FOR THE AGE OF THE CUSTOMER?

In todays hypercompetitive market, customers are in control. Increasingly powerul customers, with

ubiquitous inormation at their fingertips, powerul technology in their hands, and strong opinions in

their heads, can alter a companys ortunes overnight. Forrester defines the age o the customer as a:

20-year business cycle in which the most successful enterprises will reinvent themselves to

systematically understand and serve increasingly powerful customers.1

Technology Management Must Be Customer-Obsessed

Tese empowered customers already pressure your marketing and sales executives, who are actively

seeking technology advantages to win, serve, and retain them. Customer-acing lines o business

will find this technology advantage wherever they can rom within your data center or outside

o it. Gone are the days o a data center ruled by a ew technology illuminati. Te uture will bedominated by customer-obsessed I&O teams relentlessly ocused on sourcing the right portolio o

services and delivering better customer outcomes aster, cheaper, and at higher quality.2A customer-

ocused I&O organization is essential to:

Articulate your value to the customer and, in turn, to the business.Marketing executives, inparticular, are losing confidence in the ability o the CIO organization to collaborate with them,

provide high-quality end user support, and support changes to business strategy. Moreover,

business units increasingly plan to spend their own money on technology.3A rereshed I&O

organization will help to stem this erosion in confidence.

Stave off competition rom nimble competitors and technology providers.Your companyscompetitors want to reach powerul customers, too, and these digital upstarts arent araid to

leverage disruptive technology, like cloud services, which claim to do what I&O can do better,

aster, and at a raction o the cost. Manage this disruption or plan to be disrupted.

Shif budget to activities that win, serve, and retain customers.odays I&O organizationwill continue to be responsible or inrastructure management and internal operations what

Forrester calls the I agenda. But I&O organizations must invest more time and resources in

technologies, systems, and processes to win, serve, and retain customers this is the business

technology (B) agenda (see Figure 1).4


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Figure 1B Will Consume A Greater Share O otal echnology Budget Over ime

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.61587

IT

BT

IT

BT

IT

Technology

management

circa 1998

Technology

management

circa 2008

Technology

management

circa 2018

Use Your Consolidated And Virtualized Infrastructure To Drive Cultural Change

Expanding your mission to include the B agenda might not be easy and will require you to think

outside your I&O comort zone. But you dont have to start rom scratch. Leverage the powerul

inrastructure technologies o the past 10 years which have already transormed how you

provision and manage technology resources to guide your organizational transormation. Align

your staffing and skills around the same principles that define the modern data center:

Expand virtualization to oster storage and networking agility.Server virtualization gaveyou powerul tools to provision servers aster, protect them easily, and get rid o them with a

click. Accelerate your investment in storage and network virtualization to do the same or these

domains, and oster cross-domain training and responsibilities. Reward speed and agility: I you

can provision a new virtual server in minutes but it takes days or weeks to allocate the storage

and network resources required, your customers will suffer.5


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Consolidate operations across silos to engineer systems, not components.Exploreconsolidated inrastructure solutions to urther break down traditional silo walls. Tese

optimized systems combine compute, storage, and network components into a preintegrated

package and encourage domain experts to work together to engineer complete systems. Reward

generalists who can deliver, secure, and maintain systems. Discourage those who resist learning

skills in different domains.6

Embrace the hybrid data center delivery model.o satisy empowered customers, you willneed to build B services rom a range o suppliers: your internal systems, on-premises private

clouds, and public cloud services. Tis hybrid data center is not a uture state its here today.

Cloud has evolved in part as a reaction to poor service rom existing I&O organizations, and it

offers the first real competition many technology managers have ever aced. Design your new

organization around a hybrid service model, one in which services span multiple internal and

external providers and are controlled by a unified operations and governance model.7

Become service-oriented in everything you do.Your business stakeholders want to consumeservices, not servers or disks or routers. Te nature o a service that delights these stakeholders,

and in turn your customers, must be defined through collaboration. Service design and

refinement is an iterative process, and I&O leaders must become experts in the service lie

cycle. Your success in the age o the customer depends on your ability to offer services that are

intuitive, useul, and enjoyable (see Figure 2).8

Figure 2Te Service Design Lie Cycle Must Be An Iterative Process


Talk to the people who depend on your services.

Ask about their day-to-day functional needs.*

Offer feedback on possibilities and costs.

Keep in the context ofbusiness needs, not technology.

Test suggested option(s) agreed on above. Adapt attributes and components to fit expectations.

Negotiation cycle

Ask

Listen

Adjust

*Needs and desires are different. Focus on needs. Negotiations will yield the correct needs.

R

e

p

e

a

t


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Prepare Your I&O Organization To Be Customer-Obsessed

o satisy the demands o the B agenda, you must:

Ask or a budget increase to und your new organization.Offer to demonstrate the value othis new investment by measuring and documenting the direct impact o your new organization

on customer experience and revenue. Use this conversation to change the perception that the

I&O organization is primarily a cost center.10

Emphasize oversight, direction setting, and consulting services.As you offer morecloud services, the demand or traditional I&O tasks like system design, deployment, and

maintenance is reduced. Business units and customers will drive more technology decisions;

your role is to ensure that they are making effective and sae choices.

Separate your inrastructure and operations roles.Your inrastructure team should ocuson systems engineering, while your operations experts should ocus on process engineering.While many o their technical competencies will overlap, inrastructure and operations pros

have distinct skill sets. Te ormer must task-switch with ease, while the latter must enorce

methodologies. Encourage both skills, but discourage too much context-switching.11

Adopt specialized BT metrics.Reward customer eedback, perormance, and efficiency, notexcessive heroics. Making the change to B integration requires people to move away rom

defining themselves in terms o tactical firefighting. Forrester recommends three groups o B

metrics: 1) customer acquisition metrics to link B activities to winning new customers; 2)

financial metrics that link B to revenue and profitability growth; and 3) system-o-engagement

metrics that quantiy Bs contribution to sustaining customer relationships.12

STRUCTURE YOUR I&O ORGANIZATION TO WIN, SERVE, AND RETAIN CUSTOMERS

oday, your principal organizational objectives are most likely to make infrastructure available,

stable, and cost-efficient. In the age o the customer, those objectives must be extended to include

the definition, enablement, and governance o a range o technology services, sourced rom your

own data center and, increasingly, rom external cloud service providers.


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Organize I&O Around Services, Not Technology Silos

o better align your I&O organization with customer demands, your first step should be to break

down your inrastructure-based organizational silos and adopt a service-oriented model instead.

Tis doesnt have to be an all-or-nothing decision, however; a hybrid model with a services

overlay or matrix can also yield significant benefits (see Figure 4). Your peers are starting this

transormation. In a Q4 2013 survey o North American and European technology management

budget decision-makers, 34% plan to move to a centralized I and/or shared services model, 34%

plan to increase their cloud and as-a-service skills through retraining or new hires, and 34% plan

to increase their business relationship skills also through retraining or new hires.13As the CIO o

a major Australian bank put it, We are changing the undamental nature o our I inrastructure

team rom a cost center to a driver o value through business innovation.

Figure 4Examples O echnology-Siloed And Services-Oriented I&O Organizations


Director,

technology

management

SVP, enterprise

infrastructure

Team lead,

client work-station support

Manager,

field support

Intel servers

team

Intel clients

team

Manager,

server and

client

Team lead,

data

Team lead,

voice

Manager,

operations

Team lead,

help desk

Team lead,

networkoperations

Database

administration

Manager,

mainframe

and storage

Midrange/

mainframestorage team

Manager,

telecom-

munications

VP, application

and integration

services

VP, client

services

VP, data center

services

Director,

service center

Director,

infrastructure

PMO

Director,

service delivery

management

A technology-siloed I&O organization4-1

A services-oriented I&O organization4-2


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The New Essential I&O Design, Strategy, And Management Roles

I&O is a hybrid organization today, combining the skills o technology (inrastructure) and process

(operations) experts. As you rebalance your I&O organization to ocus on the B agenda, some

o the roles handling internal I systems o record will transer to service providers. In a services-

oriented model, only the plan part o the typical plan, build, run will remain firmly in your

technology management domain building and running services will be the responsibility o cloud

providers. Your most important I&O roles are now (see Figure 5):14

Architects (service engineers).oday, I&O architects set technical policies, define integrationstandards, and set overall guidelines or technology choices and usage. oo ofen, they also have

operational responsibilities. As more o your operations are outsourced to service providers,

I&O architects should shif ocus back to policies and integration. How and when can cloud

services be used and by whom? What integration tools and rameworks will be used to link

internal and external services? Architects make these calls.

Assemblers and designers.While architects set overall direction, assemblers and designersconstruct the services you offer and write service-level agreements to document how customers

can expect them to perorm. Assemblers create these increasingly hybrid services a mix

o internal, hosted, outsourced, and cloud-delivered by balancing customer needs against

budget and skills constraints. Tey own your service portolio and your integration work.

Process design experts.As your use o cloud services expands, youll need to adjust yourinternal I&O processes to control inrastructure you dont ully control. Look or new sources o

perormance and availability data that change what you need to monitor. I you build sofware

in the cloud, youll need to alter your current integration and release processes and automateyour inrastructure provisioning and configuration processes. Cloud-based help desk

processes might supplant existing incident management processes. Your process design

experts manage these changes.

Vendor managers.As more o your services are sourced rom external providers, your vendormanagers will have to understand the pricing models, contract terms, service levels, and

viability o a range o new suppliers. Many o these will offer complex subscription- and usage-

based pricing models that look nothing like the traditional fixed-price purchase and support

agreements that have dominated technology buying to date. I&O vendor managers should work

closely with your sourcing and vendor management team (i you have a separate one).15

Planners.Cloud inrastructure-, platorm-, and sofware-as-a-service providers offer a broadrange o services and tools to satisy different and ofen overlapping customer objectives. Your

planning team must understand the benefits and risks associated with each cloud service,

determine how it will be integrated, and set an achievable deployment plan. Planners ensure

that cloud services can be absorbed saely and consumed easily, and orecast uture compute,

storage, and network resource requirements.


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Figure 5Key Roles For A Customer-Obsessed I&O Organization


Enhanced I&O role How it operates

Assemblers/designers Assemble and integrate cloud services.

Design and modify services.

Architects Facilitate vision for future I&O services

and sourcing.

Define standards and provide oversight

for cloud-based services.

Process experts Define changes toprocesses to exploit

clouds.

Vendor managers Identify and evaluatecloud providers.

Contract management for cloud vendors.

Planners Facilitateprioritization of I&O resources.

Match supply with demand.

Recruitment Priorities: Converged Infrastructure, Cloud, And Service Automation

Skills

Te age o the customer will create a seismic shif in application portolios. Developers will

constantly update nimble systems o engagement through continuous release cycles. Te I&O

organization must reflect and enable this new reality: Application needs dictate inrastructure

choices.16Tus, I&O leaders must recruit and reward generalists who can quickly translate customer

application requirements into smart inrastructure and services choices.17

You will need the ollowing service management and automation skills:

Converged inrastructure skills.Converged platorms that combine server, storage, andnetwork resources in a prepackaged and sofware-defined solution are increasingly the products

o choice or internal clouds and data center consolidation efforts. I&O pros with converged

platorms expertise develop and promote cross-domain skills and expertise that span traditional

technology silos. Leverage these converged skills to accelerate your inrastructure delivery cycle.18

Process automation and management skills.Te I&O organization o the uture is highlystandardized, sel-service, and, above all, automated. Automation tools accelerate processes,

enorce proper execution, and allow or rapid adaptation as needs change. Look or process

experts who embrace automation and dont see it as a threat to their status or relevance.

raditional provisioning is slow and manual, while cloud provisioning is on demand, ully

automated, and application programming interace (API)-driven. Empowered customers will

not wait days or weeks or access to cloud services.19


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Service management skills.Your service catalog connects user requirements with availablecloud and internal inrastructure services, defines the services available or various customer

needs, and aligns user requirements with your delivery capabilities. Service managers own the

catalog as well as the entire service lie cycle. Your service managers might not write code, tweak

the network, or negotiate contracts, but they will know how to resolve service issues and take a

service rom concept to production, much like a product manager in a product company.

Problem management skills.In many technology management organizations, the sameproblems keep occurring, but they never get fixed properly or identified as known errors. Even

in ully automated service management organizations, the I&O team still needs a person, or

a team, who can comprehend cross-service dependencies and can see through the mess to

troubleshoot and resolve problems that cause recurring incidents. Converged inrastructure and

cloud services present new sources o error, new metrics to monitor, and new opportunities to

streamline and integrate previously disjointed problem and incident resolution processes.

Reporting, analytics, and metrics development skills.Reporting, complex analytics, andmetrics development are critical in influencing and ensuring that your B services meet business

requirements. Recruitment should ocus on I&O proessionals who can analyze, define, select,

and present value-related metrics across I&O (e.g., application perormance managers, business

and/or reporting analysts, service improvement managers, and service-level managers).20

You will need the ollowing cloud and collaboration skills:

Cloud management skills.Cloud management is different rom traditional inrastructure

management. Your cloud managers will need to have brokerage, orchestration, andadministration skills, with a firm grounding in the service management disciplines listed above.

Remember, cloud managers manage services, some o which will run on inrastructure you own,

but most o which wont. Cloud managers need cloud building, cloud operations, and cloud

governance skills, and they must collaborate closely with inrastructure operations managers.21

DevOps skills.DevOps describes the interace between I&O (the Ops) and applicationdevelopment teams (the Dev). DevOps includes the collaboration processes and automation

tools that help both teams work together to deliver sofware aster. Tese skills are important in

the uture I&O organization because developers are leading the way to cloud in most companies

today. Cloud increasingly offers them the astest way to get their jobs done with the least riction.

DevOps pros should understand the sofware development lie cycle, release management and

automation tools, and cloud-ocused configuration tools like Che and Puppet.22


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Security operations skills.Security operations describe the collaborative interace betweenI&O and security proessionals. I&O pros must extend monitoring and incident processing to

include security-related metrics and events. Remember, I&O must deliver services that are not

only highly available and perorm well but that are secure and protected.23

You will need the ollowing business and marketing skills:

Financial management skills.o I&O, any mention o financial skills is ofen met with notmy job. Te new I&O financial managers must understand service costing, unding models,

showback and chargeback, and value measurement. Cloud in particular changes unding

models and opens up new opportunities to save money, but youll need I&O pros who arent

araid to learn new skills. As more o your I&O budget shifs to the B agenda, you need to get

much more deeply involved in the business o providing B (see Figure 6).24

Customer relationship management skills.I&O pros need to banish the word users romtheir vocabularies. oday, I&O and everyone else at your company serves empowered

customers. Customer relationship managers should interact with business customers either

in support roles or as collaborators with sales and marketing managers. Hold customer

relationship managers accountable or improving customer experience across all I&O

communication channels.

Marketing skills.Marketing is the process o planning and executing a combination o product,price, place, and promotion. Historically, the I&O team has not done a good job o marketing

its products, skills, or value. Encourage your teams to actively promote the services in your

portolio: what you have, how much they cost, why you chose them, and how they maximizecustomer acquisition, retention, and experience. Public cloud providers (increasingly your

competition) can afford a Field of Dreamsi [we] build it, [they] will come approach; I&O

teams must market your services to stay competitive and exceed customer expectations.


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Figure 6Forresters Projected Path For I And B Budgets


2020

Percentage of

total technology

management

budget IT costs decreasing due to:

Application modernization Moving resources into cloud

Increased standardization

BT budgets increasing due to:

Mobility

Maintenance of customer big data

Customer experience demands

BT

IT

201820162014


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R E C O M M E N D A T I O N S

DONT WAIT TO START BUILDING YOUR BT AGENDA SKILLS PORTFOLIO

With the benefits o server virtualization and some service automation realized, most technologymanagement teams will continue down the path o abstraction and consolidation or the

inrastructure they maintain in their own data centers. Tis optimization strategy addresses the

efficiency needs o your traditional I practice. o become a customer-obsessed I&O organization,

you instead need to start augmenting your current roles and skills to support the new sofware

systems o engagement mobile, social, and big-data-driven that help your company compete

in this age o digital disruption.

Converged inrastructure and cloud skills will get you there. Use these disruptive technologies to

rethink your legacy management, automation, and governance processes and to shake up your

current I&O organization chart. Te uture o I is services-based, and your organization should

reflect that. Some firms will move everything to a cloud or outsourced environment, removing

many inrastructure administrators and operators. Most firms will augment current roles with new

skills incrementally. Make no mistake, though: While your budget may increase, your uture I&O

organization will be smaller and staffed with systems-minded generalists, cloud-savvy operators,

and collaboration experts. ake the reins and start your transormation today.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

MethodologyForresters Forrsights Budgets And Priorities Survey, Q4 2013, was fielded to 3,382 I executives and

technology decision-makers located in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India,

Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, the UK, and

the US rom small and medium-size business (SMB) and enterprise companies with 100 or more

employees. Tis survey is part o Forresters Forrsights or Business echnology and was fielded

rom June 2013 to September 2013. ResearchNow fielded this survey online on behal o Forrester.

Survey respondent incentives include points redeemable or gif certificates. We have provided exact

sample sizes in this report on a question-by-question basis.

Forresters Business echnographics provides demand-side insight into the priorities, investments,

and customer journeys o business and technology decision-makers and the workorce across the

globe. Forrester collects data insights rom qualified respondents in 10 countries spanning the

Americas, Europe, and Asia. Business echnographics uses only superior data sources and advanced

data-cleaning techniques to ensure the highest data quality.


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ENDNOTES

1 Empowered customers are disrupting every industry; competitive barriers like manuacturing strength,

distribution power, and inormation mastery cant save you. In this age o the customer, the only sustainable

competitive advantage is knowledge o and engagement with customers. See the October 10, 2013,

Competitive Strategy In he Age O he Customer report.

2 Te traditional I&O organization is an anachronism. Te typical structure and skills alignment is conducive

to neither rapid adaptation nor consolidated service visibility. Its now commonly understood that I&O

must consolidate the unctional technology silos (e.g., server, network, storage) rom an operations

perspective. See the February 6, 2012, Become Customer-Centric, Service-Focused, And Automated

report.

3 Marketers confidence in todays technology management has flagged. Alarmingly, 32% o marketers believe

that current technology management actually hinders business success. As urther evidence, Forresters

research shows business units accelerating plans to spend their own money on technology. Marketing is

particularly aggressive, increasing its private technology spending two to three times aster than I overall.

See the October 10, 2013, echnology Management In he Age O he Customer report.

4 Te B agenda ocuses on providing superior customer experiences. It requires new discipline and

doesnt ollow an easily automated process or ormula. Less mature yet rapidly evolving technologies or

superior customer interactions including social, mobile, customer analytics, and customer experience

management drive B ecosystems. See the October 10, 2013, echnology Management In he Age O

he Customer report.

5 o understand the concepts behind an enterprise readiness or sofware-defined networking (SDN) and

sofware-defined storage (SDS), see the March 5, 2014, Is Sotware-Deined Networking Ready For he

Enterprise? Part 2 O 3 report and see the May 13, 2013, Sotware-Deined Storage Will Sound he DeathKnell For raditional Storage Provisioning report.

6 oday, too much time is spent engineering components not systems. I engineering ocuses on

engineering components; B engineering must ocus on engineering complete systems. For more

inormation, see the November 4, 2013, Instill A Systems Engineering Culture Across Dev And Ops

report.

7 Reach out and embrace the hybrid cloud opportunity by proving that you can lower the burden on your

business and customers wherever and however they consume cloud services. You need to have hybrid

management skills to demonstrate your value to customers that you have the right tools to make sure

business apps deliver killer experiences. What hybrid cloud skills do you need today? For more inormation

on which hybrid cloud management skills you need today, please see the July 30, 2013, Cloud Management

In A Hybrid Cloud World report.

8 Defining the services can be greatly simplified i you practice the most basic o all business unctions: alk

to your customers! Your customers are the people who depend on your services to do their jobs. Tey

are among the most important stakeholders in your world. I you engage in active dialogue with the

stakeholders, you will collectively come to agreement on the relevant services. See the February 6, 2012,

Become Customer-Centric, Service-Focused, And Automated report.
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9 Systems o engagement empower people with smart apps and products to take the next most likely action

in their immediate context and moments o need. o understand how systems o engagement differ rom

traditional systems o record, see the November 16, 2012, Great Mobile Experiences Are Built On Systems

O Engagement report.

10While its true that tech management has been in cost-cutting mode or years, putting money into the B

agenda will translate into measurable revenue and customer satisaction value. For a deeper discussion o

this trend, see the October 10, 2013, echnology Management In he Age O he Customer report.

11When you have someone perorming multiple tasks, you want to make optimum use o the right talents.

oo many I&O staff ulfill both an engineering and an operational unction. Tis is wasteul, because

they mandate different mental aculties and emotional competencies. See the February 6, 2012, Become

Customer-Centric, Service-Focused, And Automated report and see the February 13, 2014, ransorm

Inrastructure And Operations For he Future echnology Management Cycle report.

12

While cost and efficiency will remain critical metrics or I, B needs new metrics. For more detail on ourthree proposed groups o B metrics, see the October 10, 2013, echnology Management In he Age O

he Customer report.

13Source: Forrsights Budgets And Priorities Survey, Q4 2013.

14Tese essential I&O roles were first defined by our colleague Jean-Pierre Garbani in the vision chapter o

the Forrester I&O B transormation playbook. Tey are reprinted here because they apply to every I&O

organization in transition, and we would like to thank JP or allowing us to leverage his research in this

report. See the February 13, 2014, ransorm Inrastructure And Operations For he Future echnology

Management Cycle report.

15Sourcing executives must work in a different way to enable or even drive smart approaches to

selecting providers o disruptive technologies. Leading-edge companies say that more agile, business-led

approaches to partner selection are essential to the uture o technology sourcing. Buying and partnering

in this new paradigm will be more ocused on business-oriented solutions and outcome-based engagement

models as opposed to more structured request or proposal (RFP) processes. For more guidance, see the

February 14, 2014, he New Organizational Requirements For Sourcing Digital Solutions report.

16Driven by rapidly changing customer engagement models, enterprise application portolios are evolving at

dramatically different rates on either side o a ault line. Systems o engagement applications such as mobile

and web applications are iterating at an accelerating pace, completely turning over their code in as little as

12 months. On the other side, back-office systems o record evolve at a much slower pace. See the March 12,

2014, he Seismic Shit In Application Portolios report.

17Forresters service management and automation playbook can help you urther develop these skills in your

I&O organization. Many o the skills discussed here were first identified by our colleague Glenn ODonnell

in the report, and we thank him or his permission to expand on them here. See the February 6, 2012,

Become Customer-Centric, Service-Focused, And Automated report.
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18Te sofware-defined data center promises to offer an integrated architecture that allows the merger o

legacy architectures, cloud computing, and workload-centric architectures into a single, manageable

architecture. Despite benefits, the emergence o SDDC products will impose a burden on I&O teams to

understand them and to assess their impacts. For more detail, see the November 12, 2012, he Sotware-Deined Data Center Is he Future O Inrastructure Architecture report.

19Beyond provisioning, cloud consumers also expect automated compliance, availability, scalability, and

perormance management eatures. I youve built your problem diagnosis and remediation processes

or specific inrastructure or applications you own, they will need to be generalized to handle new cloud-

specific metrics and to enable automated remediation. See the July 30, 2013, Cloud Management In A

Hybrid Cloud World report.

20Te I analytics landscape is evolving quickly. o leverage these emerging capabilities, you should ocus

more on your strategy and less on the individual tools. As attractive as they may be, plan how you will

use them beore you buy them. Remain pragmatic about timelines and expectations, and take the time to

understand the strengths and weaknesses o the vendors more so than their technologies. o understand

how analytics work and explore vendor solutions, see the December 5, 2012, urn Big Data Inward With

I Analytics report.

21In the early stages o cloud adoption, developers manage their cloud applications and inrastructure

themselves, i they manage them at all. Tey find a cloud service, open an account, select services, and

build templates, code, deploy, and then operate i they have time. What they should be doing, instead, is

coding, testing, and fixing bugs. As cloud services prolierate in your B organization, the time is ripe to

take on ull lie-cycle responsibility or cloud. For a detailed look at the skills required or cloud managers

today, see the July 30, 2013, Cloud Management In A Hybrid Cloud World report.

22

Open communication, strong systems engineering methods, and different processes must augment theautomation sofware at the center o the DevOps hype. I you merely automate poor practices, you do bad

things aster. Invert this equation and do good things aster. Tat is the secret to real DevOps glory. For

guidance on building your DevOps practice, see the September 3, 2013, he Seven Habits O Highly

Eective DevOps report.

23Our 2014 recommendations all into our major themes: 1) building customer trust; 2) securing mobile

experiences; 3) coping with big data; and 4) paving the way or successul digital disruption. For guidance

on developing a B-ocused security strategy, see the February 5, 2014, welve Recommendations For

Your Security Program In 2014 report.

24Te question is not Are you doing I financial management? in the B era, but rather How mature are

your I financial management processes? I&O pros have always had some responsibility or budgets, buthave sorely lacked advanced financial management skills. o improve yours, see the October 5, 2011, Five

Steps o Improve he I Financial Management Maturity O Your I&O Organization report.
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Forrester Research (Nasdaq: FORR) is a global research and advisory firm serving professionals in 13 key roles across three distinct client

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About Forrester

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