Strategic Roadmap to fast IT Whitepaper

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Whitepaper Build your Strategic Roadmap to Fast IT Digital disruption is affecting every sector. Understand how Cisco can help you

Transcript of Strategic Roadmap to fast IT Whitepaper

Page 1: Strategic Roadmap to fast IT Whitepaper

Whitepaper

Build your Strategic Roadmap to Fast IT

Digital disruption is affecting every sector.Understand how Cisco can help you

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Contents

Introduction 3

Part 1: What is Fast IT? 4

Fast IT and the IT department 5

What are CIOs waiting for? 6

Impact on overall organisation 6

Reining in Shadow IT 7

What does success look like? 8

Part 2: Sharing Cisco’s own journey to Fast IT 9

How Cisco IT transformed into a services organisation 9

Getting started 10

Starting with the end in mind: Cisco eStore 11

Eight years on, what are the results? 12

Part 3: Building your Strategic Roadmap to Fast IT 13

Most IT departments don’t have a sound Strategic Roadmap. Does yours? 13

How can Cisco help you in real terms? 14

Phase 1: Understand the business drivers from your stakeholders’ perspectives 15

Phase 2: Build an IT Value Map to demonstrate where value can be delivered and how results 17 should be measured

Phase 3: Build your customised Strategic Roadmap to Fast IT 19

Next Steps 22

Lessons learned 22

Why partner with Cisco? 23

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Private Cloud

Community Cloud

Public Cloud

1. Governance

2. Taxonomy

3. Service Portfolio& Catalog

4. Costing

5. Roles

6. Change

Fast IT

The Intercloud IT OperatingModel

Focus: Customers &Business Outcomes

eSto

re

• Employees• Lines of Business• Developers/IT Personnel• Consumers/Citizens

Partner Cloud

SERVICES BROKERAGE

Policy-driven Infrastructure

Pervasive Security

Bi-modal IT

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IT is embarking on a brave new missionHow Fast IT is set to radically transform IT’s business value

Introduction

From any perspective – the CIO’s, the business user’s, even the tech vendor’s – cloud, mobility and big data have taken hold of the traditional model of IT service provisioning and given it a bone-rattling shake.

As all the pieces fall back together, CIOs have been displaced and the balance of power has shifted. Today, users can reach into the cloud and, within minutes, commission services that were previously the domain of the IT department. Mobility has liberated employees to work intuitively, on the move, any time, rebalancing their work and life commitments. And big data is allowing organisations to see their worlds in exciting new ways and to react insightfully and rapidly to opportunities and threats.

What does this mean for the CIO? They must reinvent the mission and role of the IT department. It’s no longer good enough to be a competent internal IT provider.

Going forward, CIOs and their teams must become what analyst firm Gartner calls “trusted brokers” of all IT services, delivered either in-house or by a dynamic roster of external suppliers. Quite simply, it’s a matter of survival: if nothing is done, the traditional IT department will be “Uber-ised”, just like the traditional taxi industry is currently being disrupted, as are virtually all other sectors by their respective “digital disruptors”..

Figure 1. A new Operating Model for the IT department

So what must be done? Connect isolated islands of data, offer seamless access to a portfolio of relevant and compliant applications, and bring control back to IT. All this without sacrificing business agility or security.

The most powerful way to achieve this transformation, we believe, is through Fast IT.

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Imagine an employee needs to send a large file to a customer. It won’t go through email so they use a cloud file sharing service instead. It gets the job done, but the employee has broken corporate security rules, or worse, international regulations such as Basel iii or SOX. In this scenario, if IT does not offer employees an alternative solution, they will keep on using Dropbox. Instead, IT should choose an appropriate alternative and govern its use with strictly enforced usage policies and security measures.

Similarly, a developer must build a new app. It’s needed for the launch of a new product and must be completed quickly. IT can only provide her with a set of VMs – in eight weeks. So she signs up to a public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution and builds the app. However, it can’t be brought online because It’s incompatible with the internal IT environment. Clearly IT needs to react to these sorts of business demands, but doing so by providing in-house services might not be the fastest, most innovative or most cost-effective approach. Instead, sourcing an appropriate external service, tailoring it to internal needs, introducing appropriate usage policies, costing and security, then making it available to relevant lines of business (LOB), introduces the concept of Fast IT and simultaneously positions IT as a technology broker.

Part 1: What is Fast IT?Typical definitions explain it as the bringing together of both in-house and cloud-based IT resources. How has it come to be? Well, we can answer that by looking at cloud adoption and some of the issues organisations have had with public cloud services in particular.

So where are we in the IT shakedown?Well, public cloud has given business units and users a taste of the good time – independence, flexibility and agility. They’ve created processes and budgets based on cloud and now expect the IT department to deliver private clouds that not only house critical applications but also provide self-service, rapidly provisioned IT. They must also be able to show managers and corporate accountants how much each department is spending; a functionality that’s sometimes called “showback”.

As Chris Howard, Managing Vice President at Gartner puts it: “IT organisations that do not match the request for IT as a service run the risk of internal customers bypassing the IT organisation and consuming IT services from the external cloud, thereby placing the company at greater risk. IT organisations realize that they not only need to compete with the public cloud consumption model, but also must serve as the intermediary between their internal customers and all IT services — whether internal or external.”1

By focusing on business needs, or results, and combining internal and external services – via a service model we call Fast IT – the IT department will deliver the ideal balance of price and performance without introducing security and governance risk.

One incisive European customer of Cisco skillfully articulates the concept of Fast IT:

“In the next five years, the Cloud will progressively be established as the primary way of providing information services. The IT Department will become the single point of access for cloud services, brokering a coherent cloud-based service catalogue to cope with the needs of the business, employees and partners. This requires establishing the adequate governance framework, developing cloud service and security policies, and carrying out the necessary procurement actions, in collaboration with the business, employees and partners.”

1. Gartner Says Hybrid IT is Transforming the Role of IT (http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/1940715)

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Fast IT

Central ITDepartment

Reality CheckToday, 60-80% of IT Budget shortcuts the central IT Department,

Proc

urem

ent,

Cont

ract

/SLA

and

Ven

dor M

anag

emen

t

Compliance: Security Policies & Legal Obligations

eSto

re

3 Domains of IT Services1. User & Workspace Services2. Business & Customer Services3. Infrastructure & Platform Services

Technology VendorsProvide tech products & maintenance contracts

ISVsProvide applications tailored to local needs

Service ProvidersProvide customised sevices & solutions

Public IT ServicesProvide generic services & solutions

Hel

pdes

k

Uses services 1, 2 & 3

Uses services 1, 2 & 3but writes/maintains own

Uses services 2 & 3but writes/maintains own

LOB Type-AThe client

LOB Type-BThe partner

LOB Type-CThe player

LOB Type-DThe rogue

Might use some of services in 1 & 2but operatesmainly independently

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What are the risks of remaining an IT traditionalist?If we think of IT as a service that underpins an entire enterprise, it’s sensible to centralise the control of that service in the IT department – and to make it available to all business departments in a way that’s uniquely valuable to them. However, if IT leaders continue to provide technology in the traditional way, they’re likely to experience a challenging outcome: Do-It-Yourself IT, or Shadow IT. This occurs where line of business (LOB) managers source services and applications themselves, bypassing the IT department entirely.

In the end, Fast IT is about keeping up with the pace of business – giving it cloud scale, international reach and deployment agility.

Fast IT and the IT department

In its new role as agent or broker, the IT team can add value by using its expertise to source best-in-class services, oversee contracts, define usage terms and service level assurance, manage compliance, disaster recover, security and solution customisation amongst other things.

With Fast IT in place the IT department delivers value in new and enabling ways. As a result, lines of business can forget technology and focus on what they do best.

Fast IT: What’s in it for the CIO?• Being relevant to the business by playing

a leading role in driving transformation• Creating enhanced user and device experiences

for all internal “customers”• Building a more productive, responsive

organisation that uses IT to maximum effect

• Presiding over an IT ecosystem that consistently delivers high performance at the best possible price

• Rapid access to cost-effective technologies• More automation, which reduces the cost

of IT management

Figure 2. The new role of IT

Adopting Fast IT as the core operational model allows IT leaders to retain control while compelling these “rogue” LOB departments to become partners instead.

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What are CIOs waiting for?

As with many brilliant concepts, when it comes to putting them into practice, challenges arise. With Fast IT these include:

• Changing IT team structures and updating old practices with new skills• Making sure that everyone fully understands IT’s new role• Properly controlling all processes• Centralising and simplifying IT functions (e.g. service desk, data centre)• Changing the spending focus from products to services• Complying with increasingly strict data regulations whether for data sovereignty, security or local laws

Organisations want IT to deliver the flexibility and agility they need while keeping them secure. IT on the other hand will need to coordinate several clouds at the same time, aggregating, integrating, customising and securely delivering services based on hundreds of apps from dozens of vendors in public and private clouds.

To complicate the matter further, nothing in business stands still for long. That’s why a progressive, iterative approach to Fast IT will allow CIOs to plough insights back into their particular model, so that it is always in sync with the business.

Impact on the overall organisation

For Fast IT to work well enterprises will need buy-in from relevant personnel and departments, including managers, procurement and IT. These functions will need to shift their thinking and the way they work to support Fast IT models. How can this be achieved? Through revised operational processes, business relationships and technologies that make the sourcing of IT services transparent, dynamic, efficient and effective. And it might also require a stick and carrot approach that couples executive dictates with illustrations of how departments will benefit by working with an IT broker.

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Reining in Shadow IT

For CIOs who think Shadow IT is not a problem here is a reality check. The latest Cisco Cloud Consumption Service survey highlights the scale of the problem:

Cisco routinely finds around 10-15 times more public cloud services than CIOs initially expect. Consequently, enterprise leaders should brace themselves for problems around lack of control, governance, business risks and escalating costs, not to mention managing the impact of cloud on existing IT infrastructure.

738The average

enterprise uses 738 cloud services

3816We identified 3816 unique

cloud services

11%Only 11% of respondents encrypt data

16%Only 16% provide

multi-factor authentication

4%Only 4%

are ISO 27001 certified

63%63% of cloud

services are wrongly categorised

by URL

93%IT is unaware

of 93% of cloud use

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What does success look like?

Fast IT gives CIOs the platform to transform their departments into something they have always wanted to be, but never quite achieved: a business enabler. Let’s wrap up this section with a summary of the ten key principles of Fast IT:

1The IT Department becomes a Service Broker: the supervised gate to the Intercloud, enabling self-service consumption for end-user, administrators and IT personnel, with optimised flexibility, time-deployment and cost effectiveness

2 No lock-in: organisations can choose the best provider and service for their needs, exit if and when required, and migrate workloads freely between different hypervisors or clouds

3A new approach to procurement and contracting services: one that lets organisations consume how they prefer. These include Private Cloud (e.g. constant workloads), Public Cloud (e.g. bursts or disaster recovery), Hybrid Cloud, Community Cloud; IaaS, PaaS, SaaS; OPEX-based (pay-per-use, pay-per-user), CAPEX-based (fixed price); level of customer support; level of security; level of availability (SLA); or Quality of Service (QoS)

4 Horizontal cloud platforms for all applications, instead of siloed, vertical stacks

5 Dynamic compliance with current regulations around data privacy and sovereignty rules

6 End-to-end security that consistently enforces policy across the hybrid cloud

7 One point of management and control for physical and virtual workloads across clouds

8 Integration with the existing IT environment to simplify how applications are deployed and managed across clouds

9 Reliability and performance that delivers the high levels of availability today’s users demand

10 Standards, open APIs and interoperability that will mobilise applications

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Part 2: Sharing Cisco’s own journey to Fast ITAs a large enterprise ourselves, we have completed our journey to Fast IT. It began in 2007 and today our IT department operates like a business, delivering competitively priced services to our internal customers, measuring their needs in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO), and directly impacting business outcomes.

We’ve learned many lessons on our journey that we can share with our customers and which we use to create customised roadmaps to Fast IT for them.

How Cisco IT transformed into a services organisation

Before our IT department transformed into a services-centric team it worked with “the business” in terms of deploying specific technologies and resources rather than looking at business outcomes and ensuring IT maximised their value. As a result, it was often difficult to see the link between IT investments and company performance.

With this scenario in mind we began our journey to becoming an IT as a Service Organisation (ITaaSO). First we crafted a clear vision of the kind of group we wanted to be, including a broad view of the changes we would need to make.

For instance, we knew that changing the way services are defined, delivered, consumed and financed was going to be core to the success of our organisation. We also knew that we’d have to change how IT measures success, evaluates costs and assigns roles and responsibilities.

Figure 3 illustrates the output from this phase.

Figure 3. Cisco’s ITaaSO transformation: Before and After

From To

IT organisation vertical, function-centric

IT organisation aligned with business capabilities across

functions

Technology, systems focus Customer/client-focused

IT measured on delivery and availability of systems

IT metrics based on integrated strategies, focus on

end-to-end service delivery

Solutions designed with customer input

Capability roadmaps developed with the business,

strategic alignment

IT assesses and conveys development costs

IT discusses TCO with internal customers/clients

Reward custom/unique architecture approach

Reward reuse, leverage of existing solutions

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Getting started

Having defined the vision for Fast IT, we arranged the immense amount of work we had to do into six major focus areas, as follows:

Results

We know Fast IT is a success at Cisco because our people now talk about business needs, the cost and value of the services we provide, tradeoffs and funding decisions in ways that are meaningful to internal clients and customers.

“Most of our clients aren’t interested in technical details,” says Shawn Shafai, member of technical staff, Connected IT Services. “They want to know how Cisco IT is going to help them solve a problem, overcome a challenge, or move their business forward. They’re interested in business outcomes.”

Well-planned change management is critical for success, as is a CIO who will play strong visionary and advocacy roles. Getting all stakeholders on the same page and keeping momentum going throughout the transformation requires considerable effort and synchronisation from everyone in IT and the business. When done properly, it can lead to a powerful transformation.

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Streamlining taxonomyBeing consistent about what we call each IT service and the way it is described is essential in a Fast IT strategy. It took us nearly two years to finalise our new services taxonomy. When we began the process our portfolio contained 50 service categories, 259 services and over 2800 service offerings. Today there are 52 service categories, 174 services and 720 service offerings!

2

RolesTo deliver services in a different way we had to make significant changes to the roles and responsibilities of our IT staff. We introduced a series of new job titles such as service executive, service owner, business relationship manager, service lifecycle manager, technology architect manager and others. We were able to re-skill many of our existing IT people so that they could take up one of these new roles.

3Service portfolio & catalogueAll the service offerings we offer are listed in the service portfolio whether current, in development or retired. When service offerings go live, we add them to our online catalogue, called the Cisco eStore.

4

Service costingTo run IT like a business you need to set a value and a cost for every service. Making those costs transparent is vital so that users can keep track of budgets. It also allows IT to better quantify or “showback” its value to the business, understand application costs, break down the IT budget by service, identify possible cost savings and provide investment data.

5

GovernanceTo make sure that IT stays on track with Cisco’s business needs we run quarterly architecture reviews. They’re hosted by our CIO and include the following verification activities:

• Organisational Health – talent sharing, empowering a culture of innovation• Architectural Review – evaluating dependencies and standards adoption• Services Review – assessing service goals and metrics• Strategic Investment Planning – portfolio planning and development

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Change managementWhen any business embraces Fast IT everyone has to change their mindset and get more “services oriented”. Each department must chart its own change management plan, but the process usually includes these steps:

• Bring senior leaders on board• Define high-level changes• Activate first adopters• Accelerate adoption• Sustain the new culture

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Starting with the end in mind: Cisco eStore

As we discussed earlier, all our service offerings are accessible within a single online catalogue: the Cisco IT eStore. Simply put, it’s our one-stop-shop for requesting IT services and replaces lots of legacy systems.

ChallengeWe pitched the idea of an eStore to solve a very painful user problem: complexity. Users had to learn and navigate a different system for each IT service – from opening an account to requesting mobile apps. This fragmented approach was inefficient for IT and for users, and it didn’t support mobile access or collaboration, which were gaining popularity at Cisco through BYOD.

SolutionIT wanted a cohesive, efficient self-service environment and realised that this could be built entirely using Cisco commercial solutions. Cisco eStore is running on top of Cisco Prime Service Catalogue and Cisco Process Orchestrator – see figure 4. Cisco Prime Service Catalogue enables IT service ordering. It supports reporting, chargeback, entitlement and authorisation. It also makes sure that service names remain consistent. Cisco Process Orchestrator is fully integrated with Cisco’s enterprise systems and automates the requests for new services.

Now users’ orders for applications and infrastructure are processed in minutes instead of days – and it’s also much easier for employees and IT staff to track orders.

Figure 4. Cisco IT Services eStore architecture

IT Infrastructure

Desktop HW

Mobile HW

Reporting

Cisco eStore

Cisco Prime Service Catalog

Cisco Process Orchestrator

ApprovalsEntitlement

Access to Storefront From All OS & Device Types

Pervasive Enterprise Security

(versions,enhancement, trusted devices)

Personalised & User-Friendly

Store for All IT Services

Tied to EnterpriseService Management

Automated and Seamless Back-End Service Provisioning

Desktop SW

Mobile Apps

Collaboration Services

Chargeback Taxonomy

Benefits of this low-touch system include:

• Five-hour reduction in employee on-boarding times• Twenty percent decrease in “how-do-I” questions

from users• A seamless user experience that reduces visit

times by 15 minutes

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The mobile-ready eStoreWe’ve recently added a new mobile app store that lets employees place orders for IT services via their own smartphones and tablets. Who’s controlling user access? The system contains user profiles that list the services each user may order. This gives IT full control and ensures that everyone adheres to corporate policies on IT use.

Eight years on, what are the results?

Fast IT has allowed us to radically improve the way we deliver services without increasing the IT budget.

On a flat-to-declining overall IT budget we have achieved a great deal:

Cut server provisioning times from some 12 weeks to less than 15 minutes

Enter the store App selection App description App installation

Rolled out new, global telepresence and video architecture with more

than 1600 endpoints

Migrated all applications to x86 with more than 85% virtualised

Doubled the number of supported end-user devices

Consolidated a dozen data centres down to a pair of active-active data centres

Integrated more than 50 acquisitions

Access to Storefront From All OS & Device Types

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Part 3: Building your Strategic Roadmap to Fast ITMost IT departments don’t have a sound Strategic Roadmap. Does yours?

It’s impossible not to see the incredible benefits Fast IT offers the CIO and the business. The question is: How can your IT department get there?

If IT leaders want to evolve from merely “running IT” to becoming business enablers a Strategic IT Roadmap is essential. Yet it’s surprising how few CIOs have one.

What does the roadmap do?It tells IT and business leaders how a proposed set of technologies, processes and structures will best support their goals during a given period of time, usually around three to five years.

How should it be used?

1. To facilitate investment discussions between IT leaders and functional heads, shifting the focus away from pure costing to the actual value IT is bringing to the business

2. To bring IT personnel on-board with the new strategy, and communicate the evolving roles and responsibilities of each team

3. To improve project and resource planning so that IT can better predict upcoming requirements, plan project roles, select vendors and assess costs

By continually returning to their roadmap, our customers will gain a higher level of buy-in from all stakeholders – which is an important factor in the success of any project, especially those involving cultural transformation. And because most organisations’ objectives are continuously evolving, documenting changes to strategy, and their impact on projects, helps everyone remain focused.

What’s in a roadmap?A great strategic roadmap will include:

• A blue-sky vision and strategy statement• A clear documentation of the key business drivers• The organisational structure to carry out the necessary changes• A portfolio of programmes and projects – with clear metrics of success• A business case for each project• Projected costs and timescales• Project owners – executive sponsors and project managers

To make best use of cloud, mobile, big data and other innovations, CIOs must instigate a desire to change the current status quo. They must endorse a new approach – embracing their business’s strategic priorities and re-inventing the IT department so that it can invest in technologies that will help to achieve those ambitions.

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How can Cisco help you in real terms?

As you’ve already seen, we have gone through the process of moving to Fast IT ourselves. We used that experience, plus the many commercial projects we have worked on, to create a methodology that CIOs and their teams can use to build a Strategic Roadmap to Fast IT.

Ours is a uniquely pragmatic approach. We quickly identify the main business drivers and link them to a set of tangible IT projects to deliver quick wins with maximum impact and rapid ROI. Our three-phased approach is based on well-respected and much tested industry standards including COBIT, TOGAF, ITIL, SFIA, to name but a few.

Phase One

Clearly identify and document the business drivers for IT from the business (LOB) perspectives

Phase Two

Build the IT Value Map to demonstrate how IT is structured to deliver value and how success will be measured

Phase Three

Using output from phases one and two, identify and prioritise the key programmes and projects that will deliver the biggest impact, enabling a successful execution of the IT Management Plan for this year, the next 3 years and beyond.

Let’s look at those three phases in a bit more depth.

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Phase One: Understand the business drivers from your stakeholders’ perspectives

By reviewing the business’s current situation and ideal future state we’ll create a clear picture of how they will need to evolve. To do this we use eight of the most relevant drivers that COBIT 5 identifies in its complete 17-point framework. Here they are.

Driver 1: A culture of partnership for business and IT innovation.Change can only happen when there is trust between IT and business stakeholders. Fostering collaborative attitudes helps. We’ll look at multi-level partnerships and agree roles and responsibilities to create common goals within a shared IT Capability Framework.

Driver 2: Managed business change programs.Quickly identifying and empowering “champions of change” will accelerate the transformation to Fast IT. Innovation must be supported by top management and coordinated through agile, virtual teams. We’ll look at how well current operations support best practice change management.

Driver 3: User-orientated service culture. IT must become more service-orientated and clearly demonstrate its value to users. Monitoring KPIs and improving processes will support this. We’ll confirm what the IT department and LOBs are responsible for, and review how we can cut the overall cost and complexity of IT processes.

Driver 4: Agile responses to a demanding business environment.IT has to be agile – responsibly meeting the needs of the business in terms of time to service, flexibility and interoperability. We’ll review flexibility and the layers of authorisation that get in the way of creating a responsive IT department.

Driver 5: Financial transparency and value for money.IT departments are often unable to tailor services to meet the unique expectations of different LOBs in terms of cost, security and flexibility etc. If users become dissatisfied with the lack of financial transparency ‘Shadow IT’ quickly takes off. We’ll assess the affordability of IT services and whether they can be offered as a secure utility — scalable, measured and if possible, on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Driver 6: Managed Business Risk.Information availability is crucial in every enterprise. However, when the security team is seen as “Doctor No”, it doesn’t take a long time for LOBs to find workarounds. To balance the business benefits with its cost, security should be determined for each application. Therefore, we’ll examine how we can make actively managing risk achievable.

Driver 7: Operational and staff productivity.Today’s employees expect IT to work the way they want it to – not the other way around. IT must adopt a user-centric model, powered by technologies that drive collaboration and delivered in an environment of Continuous Service Improvement (CSI). We’ll identify quick wins, such as BYOD, mobility and telepresence initiatives, with positive results for users.

Driver 8: Skilled and motivated people. As the IT environment evolves, so must employee’s skills. Continuously. They’ll need to be supported by a learning curriculum that is blended, easily accessible and collaborative. Proactive, forward-looking training will help them to take on new roles and adapt to the new technologies or processes that Fast IT brings. This is often also the piece of the strategy that’s missing. We’ll look at current training practices and how they can be strengthened and altered to ensure success.

We kick off a Strategic Roadmap to Fast IT with a series of detailed interviews with business sponsors, IT managers and end users. Using a range of tried and tested principles and practices (in particular the COBIT 5 framework), we’ll provide an end-to-end business view of how IT is perceived from the outside – including how technology creates value for your clients and what needs evolving.

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Prioritising the IT enablers

With a clear understanding of what the business wants to achieve with a move to Fast IT, we’ll be able to help the CIO identify and prioritise the most critical IT enablers.

For example, a set of IT processes might be recognised as particularly key, such as managing the portfolio, or ensuring that governance frameworks are set and maintained.

A complete list of IT enablers, as defined by COBIT5, is represented in this graphic. You can learn more at isaca.org/cobit/

COBIT 5 Enterprise Enablers

2. Processes 3. Organisational Structures

4. Culture, Ethics and Behaviour

1. Principles, Policies and Frameworks

5. Information 6. Services, Infrastructure and

Applications

RESOURCES

7. People, Skills and

Competitions

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Phase Two: Build an IT Value Map to demonstrate where value can be delivered and how results should be measuredOnce we understand the business situation we’ll review IT to determine the value it should provide and how success should be measured. We survey the IT department through the lens of three service domains, supported by six governance pillars.

All existing IT functions are evaluated against this IT Value Map, which will allow us to identify any capability gaps and to make the current organisation more efficient.

Service Domain 1: User and workspace services

How does IT empower businesses and employees to work more efficiently together?By deploying modern collaboration and mobility tools – everything from IM and web conferencing to tablets and BYOD – organisations will create stimulating, open and positive workplaces. As a result, they’ll bring silo’ed departments together and appeal to top talent and young recruits attracted by the potential to move horizontally or geographically within the organisation.

Service Domain 2: Application and database services

How does IT ensure that information systems are effective & efficient, reliable & secure, and economically run?IT departments must change the way they work – freeing themselves from tactical, labour-intensive tasks to focus on strategically important activities, such as providing IT consultancy to LOBs, next-gen application development, and finding new ways to manage costs while speeding time to market. They’ll achieve this by simplifying systems management, using DevOps best practices, and shifting development and production environments, where appropriate, to cloud.

Service Domain 1:User and workspace services

Service Domain 3:Infrastructure and platform services

Service Domain 2:Application and database services

A sound Fast IT strategy focuses on three Service Domains, supported by six Governance Pillars, to give you the visibility and control you need to drive the IT transformation process.

Pillar 1:Vision,

strategy, execution

and metrics

Pillar 3:Business process

improvement, project

management & quality control

Pillar 4:Innovation,

architecture, solution

portfolio & lifecycle

management

Pillar 5:Finance

& sourcing optimisation

Pillar 6:Risk

management and cyber security

Pillar 2:People, culture,

communication and change

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Service Domain 3: Infrastructure and platform services

How does IT provide a cost-effective, rock-solid, automated infrastructure to develop and operate critical applications throughout the enterprise?By rationalising data centres, then building an IT operation based on best practices for Disaster Recovery, security and support with industry-defining SLAs for systems availability, IT departments will reduce costs and create an incredibly robust environment capable of supporting mission-critical applications. Finally, and with input from LOB champions, IT should begin the journey to Fast IT putting at the core a self-service portal that accelerates service delivery and user satisfaction.

Governance Pillar 1: Vision, strategy, execution and metrics

How do you guarantee top-down alignment of IT investments with the enterprise strategy? Which governance structure will maximise benefits, reduce risk and optimise resources?Create an enterprise-wide “Digital Transformation Strategy” with a Vision, Strategy, Execution and Metrics (VSEM) framework that works across the business. Then move on to hearing and evaluating the needs of the business and of users. Once complete, keep transformation projects rolling by setting up governance teams to guide IT decision-making and ensure logical execution. Think about a Strategic IT Council that includes all IT Directors supported by Coordination Bodies focused on common projects.

Governance Pillar 2: People, culture, communication and change

How do you drive a successful transformation programme, adapting the skill sets of your people, making them receptive to change and communicating tailored messages to internal audiences?Business leaders will build trust with employees by making a strategic commitment to regular two-way internal communication. Engaged, well-informed people who know what is expected of them and who understand the strategic vision feel valued and empowered, and are open to change and re-skilling. This helps to create a positive, rewarding environment, where people from IT and LOB departments can flourish, and where top talent wants to be. In some cases, a group of engineers and developers are seconded to work on a specific project, as if they were at a start-up. We call this a “spin-in”.

Governance Pillar 3: Business process improvement, project management & quality control

What mechanisms and measurements will create a culture that is focused on continually improving processes and embracing new technologies?Maturing business process reengineering capabilities will help the business understand how digitising IT processes, introducing ITIL-based best practices, and adopting professional project management processes can drive efficiency while balancing measurement and control with creativity and innovation.

Governance Pillar 4: Innovation, architecture, solution portfolio & lifecycle management

How should IT enable continuous innovation and efficiently reuse existing expertise — creating a forward-looking IT department that acts like a business?Before anything else, IT must rationalise and standardise the technology portfolio and professionally manage it going forward. Then by documenting and actively promoting re-usable standards and reference architectures, IT can drive efficiency. Finally, by scouting the market for new technologies that will help the business to achieve its ambitions and actively driving adoption, IT will foster a culture and capability of continuous innovation.

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Governance Pillar 5: Finance & sourcing optimisation

How can IT investments be conducted in a smart, value-orientated way with real transparency about how the money is spent?IT must review how it acquires and delivers services. Insourcing high-value activities while outsourcing commodity services and tactical activities will reduce operational costs, as will focusing on Total Cost of Ownership rather than initial CapEx. When evaluating investments, focus on quality rather than price and find inventive, transparent financial models that reduce administrative overheads and concentrate on ROI. And when managing suppliers, direct IT procurement to optimise SLAs and encourage a partnership attitude in order to generate more value from contracts.

Governance Pillar 6: Risk management and cyber security

How can you manage risk and secure the information flows that empower users?Making information readily accessible while keeping it secure requires a strategic rather than product-oriented approach to information security. Risk should be continually assessed in relation to cyber attack intelligence, and cyber security should be enforced by deploying Common Security Policy based on the ISO27k standard. Finally, since people are every organisation’s weakest link, set up security training and keep communicating.

Phase Three: Build your customised Strategic Roadmap to Fast ITOnce the assessments in phase 2 have been completed, the Cisco solution architects pull together a strategic roadmap built around a number of key IT programmes (seven, in the example we provide below).

Together, this provides the basis of a Fast IT strategic vision for both the enterprise and their chosen IT partners.

Cisco can engage on a project-by-project basis, identifying quick wins and high-impact projects such as those we outline next.

Funded WorkshopsCisco IT Best

Practice SharingServices Products and Solutions

Programmes Horizon 1 Horizon 2 Horizon 3

IT Strategy and Communication

Cyber Security

Application-centric Cloud

Next-gen App Development

eStore

Workspace and Collaboration

IT Service Management

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Programme 1: IT Strategy and Communication

How do you create visibility, coherence and control in what is a necessarily complex and changing landscape?

By leveraging state-of-the-art data virtualisation technologies, Cisco can help create a bespoke CIO dashboard giving senior IT officers easy access to reliable and relevant data that is centralised and available in near real-time.

This helps them rapidly identify and stamp out inefficiencies. It spans everything from IT health and KPIs to infrastructure capacity monitoring, information systems usage, Data Centre size and power consumption, financial efficiencies, HR performance and security.

Programme 2: Cyber Security

With unrelenting cyber attackers constantly innovating, how can you build a pragmatic IT security strategy that balances risks with benefits?

Our security experts can help the CISO professionally manage security – working with external parties to deliver threat defence, ensure compliance and leverage industry best practices. Cisco can provide expert training for people – the weakest link in security – and advise on the co-ordination of security activities:

risk management, information security governance, organisational structure, policies and processes including incident management. Finally, we can release the IT team from day-to-day security operations to direct security architecture.

Programme 3: Application-Centric Cloud

How can enterprises deliver cost-effective and secure IT services to better support their traditional enterprise applications, called Systems of Record, using virtualised, automated infrastructure?

Cisco can help you solve this problem by consolidating your data centres, transitioning them to application-centric hubs and connecting them to the Intercloud, allowing the seamless and secure mobility of enterprise IT workloads between clouds – whether private, virtual-private, or public.

Not only does this reduce manual processes – and their costs – it improves the speed, agility, and security of the data centre. Automating IT services such as networking, storage and virtualisation means they can be accessed on demand via a self-service portal. What’s more, developers can build and publish tailor-made stacks there too.

Programme 4: Next-gen Application Development

How do you help enterprises make the most of “Systems of Engagement” built on cloud technologies that help employees to engage with “sticky” activities, like collaboration?

Cisco can create a cloud-first environment that’s radically different from traditional set-ups that cater to Systems of Record. Cisco’s OpenStack Private Cloud is a remotely managed solution, providing you with a completely flexible, programmable infrastructure, combining the scalability of public cloud with outstanding visibility, security and control.

Whether you use it for application development, production systems or both, we can manage your production-ready solution 24/7. Alternatively your administrators can use the OpenStack dashboard to manage it themselves.

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Programme 5: eStore

How do you give users simple and rapid access to a range of modern IT services – to improve their experience of IT, to drive their productivity and to minimise Shadow IT?

We can help you streamline your IT request processes and put in place a single, unified service catalogue with an eStore at the front end that allows users to find and request role-appropriate products and services.

This will create a fast, efficient user experience, help IT and LOBs to easily manage IT budgets through an integrated approval process, enabling a paperless enterprise.

Programme 6: Workspace & Collaboration

How do you create and manage high-quality, innovative workplace solutions that create new ways of working and collaboration for staff?

Our collaboration specialists will first help you to build a corporate collaboration strategy that works the way your people do. We can underpin this with a secure, state-of-the-art mobile-enabled collaboration platform that spans voice, video, data and IM and cost-effectively manage it for you.

We’ll review how social and collaborative tools, mobility and BYOD bring new value to your organisation. And by creating a Centre of Excellence, we can encourage adoption and increase users’ satisfaction.

Programme 7: IT Service Management

How do you help IT create a more customer-oriented standardised service offering that can deliver great quality and cost savings?

Using a blend of processes and IT tools, we can help you to create better customer relationships by automating the service catalogue, helping you to prepare for the next generation of office automation, and better orchestrate third-party services through one portal.

We’ll use a well-proven quality framework to ensure superior service delivery based on ITIL processes and best practices.

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Next StepsLessons learned

Before embarking on the journey to Fast IT, take a look at these very important considerations – they provide you with some valuable practical do’s and don’ts – that will smooth the transition and help you to swerve some of the more common roadblocks.

• Don’t underestimate the time it will take shift to Fast IT. This transformational journey spans years, not months.

• Guarantee the commitment of CXOs. Buy-in and endorsement from senior IT and business leaders is crucial.

• Abandon traditional thinking. Don’t let IT’s organisational structure, activities, budgets, or architecture define your services.

• Don’t expect to get service taxonomy right the first time. There is no perfect list for the types and quantity of service offerings.

• Define services from the user perspective only. Developing a catalogue of services from this perspective might require radical thinking.

• Don’t confuse IT services with the activities that the IT team performs. Mixing them up will dilute the value of the services IT provides.

• A service catalogue is about information. The shiniest, latest IT tool won’t do the job if the information inside it doesn’t resonate with users.

• Fill the service catalogue with what your users need and want: Prioritise items. Not everything can or should go into the catalogue at once.

• Promote employee acceptance of change. A transition on the scale of Fast IT will create concerns and questions among employees. Allay their concerns through ongoing awareness and education efforts and back the transformation with a solid organisational change management plan.

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Why partner with Cisco?

At Cisco, we believe Fast IT has the power to completely transform the role and the value of IT. It is a critical imperative for CIOs that requires clever thinking, a pragmatic approach and brilliant blending of leading edge technologies and well-proven processes to bring to fruition.

Yet deploying Fast IT so that it delivers maximum business value requires a partner with an intimate understanding of the highly complex systems, dependencies, practical restrictions and regulatory barriers that influence IT today.

In real terms, we can help you create a new IT operation, with insights and recommendations for organisational change, service and support management and IT re-platforming. Ours is a lean, results-driven approach that delivers rapid, tangible results from a smart, long-term roadmap.

Use our market distinction – the powerful combination of products, services and software – to build your strategic plan, execute the vision, realise the value and ease your move to Fast IT.

About Cisco’s cloud leadership

• Cisco ranked leader of the cloud infrastructure equipment market. Synergy Research Group (http://www.srgresearch.com/research/cloud-infrastructure-equipment)

• Cisco services are used most often across all 3 cloud categories: cloud applications, application platforms, and infrastructure - IDC survey of March 2013

• Cisco was rated “Worldwide Major Player” for cloud professional services. IDC: MarketScape Cloud Professional Services survey, August 2013

• Cisco rated number one for private cloud strategy and placed Cisco in the top three for cloud management (Cisco IAC) and infrastructure management (Cisco UCS® Director). Forrester 2013

Cisco has deep IT expertise, hands-on experience with IT transformation and a very practical approach to the many challenges that lie ahead. It’s a combination that has won us a trusted place at the heart of many Fast IT initiatives throughout the world.

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Whitepaper

© 2015 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Your enterprise is facing digital disruption - today. And the IT department is the essential enabler to your success. But only if you are delivering Fast IT.

IT leaders looking for that rare mix of transformational thinking and real-world can-do and know-how will find their perfect partner in Cisco.

If you’d like to know more, please contact: [email protected]