New market trends, changing customer behaviour and new business models and technologies impact companies and the way they operate nowadays. One impact is quite important, yet less visible one, covering management and governance of the business itself. Increasing complexity of internal products, services and processes, significantly growing number of vendors, external services, and business models together with fragmentation and hybridization of the business (not just IT) infrastructure makes standard operating practices and process difficult to use, as we inevitably shift from the old one-vendor-lock-in delivery model to mix of fragmented cloud and onsite services.
To grasp current trends efficiently, you need to have a light-weight process with ideally simple supporting tool(s). Basically you need to cover just these 3 areas with your business, IT and external vendors:
- Establish platform for business and IT communication — this covers the initial phase of gathering, visualization and discussion about the service needs, their impact and criticality, needed parameters, costs, evolution. Of course, it is important to check this regularly and update as the market conditions change.
- Focus on the right things, the rest can wait for now — knowing what part of business or IT infrastructure need to be improved and how, in the ocean of thousands services, components and inquiries from all the stakeholders and departments is the key. How? Based on what? Mapping and visualization of all the dependencies could help.
- Follow-up regularly and automate also the governance around these processes. It helps you to plan, track and follow actions and events among all levels of services and vendors, internal, as well as external.
Sounds simple, but not as easy to implement. Therefore, we described mentioned scenarios more in the details here:
See more in detail another relevant information and manuals about Map, focus, Automate governance: