The role of IT is changing. Companies are looking to IT as a business innovator. And IT4IT can help you transform old IT practices into new, business-driven ones.
In the early days of enterprise IT, companies considered the department a cost center. Expensive hardware and costly overhead kept IT from going through with business initiatives.
But all that has changed in the last decade. A new age of tech has fostered a culture of disruption to the status quo across industries. And that’s changing the way that IT is organized and managed.
Today, companies look at IT as a business driver.
IT has typically been guided by standards, best practices, and frameworks for their operations—like ITIL.
However, these practices haven’t kept up with the rapid technological development of the twenty-first century.
IT needs a fresh approach, and some believe it can be found in IT4IT.
What is IT4IT?
Launched in October 2016 by The Open Group, IT4IT is a vendor-neutral prescriptive IT reference architecture.
IT4IT takes data collected by a network. Then, IT4IT delivers actionable feedback on how to optimize your infrastructure to support your department’s role as a business driver.
With IT4IT, IT takes on a production-organized structure. That means IT produces and delivers services based on the demands of the business. And it means that the IT department should adopt a value chain concept.
IT4IT allows IT to view, organize, and manage its functions as if it were a business in its own right.
Here’s how.
All you need to do is take your current landscape and map it on IT4IT, which “provides a structured approach to specifying the functional components and information model needed to standardize the end-to-end IT value chain,” according to TechBeacon.
The IT4IT model divides the value chain into four value streams:
- Strategy to portfolio
- Requirement to deployment
- Request to fulfill
- Detect to correct
These four value streams provide a framework to identify areas of overlap and inefficiency. And this allows IT to lower costs, streamline processes, and address issues faster.
IT4IT in the Wild
IT4IT is a relatively new solution. So it’s far from a quick fix to entrenched problems within an IT department. Still, companies have already started leveraging it with great success.
After becoming frustrated with a persistent data issue in ITSM, one IT team decided to view the issue through the value chain and system-thinking lens of IT4IT. The team eventually sourced the issue in upstream data from the corporate ERP system, rather than the CMDB. IT4IT enabled them to address the actual problem rather than waste time attacking a source that wasn’t actually broken.
The Need for Data
IT4IT is not a replacement for any specific system. Instead, it builds on an existing IT infrastructure and supports it.
IT teams hoping to leverage it still need a source of reliable and accurate data. The solution and the information that supports IT4IT are interconnected and codependent.
“Innovative technologies, such as big data and the cloud, can only be of value to the business if they can be properly implemented and managed,” writes Rob Akershoek in Computer Weekly. “IT leaders realize that current IT operating models no longer address the new role of IT in the business, and that the IT function needs to reinvent itself.”