Dig beneath all the cloud-speak, and there's a fundamental truth: most progressive enterprise IT organizations are starting to envision a future where they look more like service providers, and less like business-as-usual IT departments.
As I listen to IT leaders speak, I occasionally here phrases like "we need to run IT as a business" and "IT needs to compete for the business". That means -- for me -- that these people will want to study how service providers do what they do, and -- more importantly -- what's going on in the enterprise-IT-focused service provider community.
You might not be aware, but I've been focusing on service provider models for a while now. I occasionally update a second blog ("Service Provider Insider") with my various observations and ruminations.
One of the big strategy challenges for many IT service providers is deciding what is core, and what is context?
The idea is to invest in what's core, and partner for everything else. That line of thinking has also started to emerge in enterprise IT thinking, especially as more service providers offer increasingly attractive alternatives to simply doing it yourself.
If this line of thinking is appealing to you, I'd encourage you to read this post I just did on "The Evolving Enterprise SP Supply Chain".
Why? Change a few words, and the thinking could also apply to many of the more progressive IT organizations I'm working with these days :)
Recently at the CIO 100 symposium and award ceremony there was good discussion on IT's role as an innovator. One of the models, IT as a service provider, was actually a minority view as most IT leaders in attendance saw themselves more as business partners.
However, while this may seem in conflict with your hypothesis, these roles reflected a heirarchy and providing exceptional services and business capability was foundational to establishing a culture for innovation.
Read more about my insights from the CIO 100 conference and Intel IT best practices in my blog http://ow.ly/6h7FR
Chris
IT@IntelSME
Posted by: Chris_P_Intel | August 30, 2011 at 07:29 PM