Hannes Botes, Chief Technology Officer, MANXiT, unpacks the issues and fears surrounding the outsourcing of IT Management as a service (ITMaaS) and directs businesses to Re-Imagine IT.
ITMaaS may be defined as outsourcing the management of a company’s IT – a concept that can either strike fear into the heart of every CIO but if examined knowledgeably can in fact be the saviour of businesses stressed to deliver globally competitive service.
We live in a world where applications are the face of business. The application economy has changed our lives and the business landscape forever. Traditional business channels are being usurped by electronic and mobile. The pace of business, coupled with continuous change creates unparalleled challenges for IT.
By outsourcing the management of a company’s IT businesses are provided with the ability to forget about having to manage the day to day IT and instead focus on their core business issues, namely running and growing the organisation.
That makes perfect sense surely?
But for some execs and possibly specifically CIO’s, ITMaaS can be a frightening prospect that includes loss of control over their IT domain, possibly diminishing the extent of their role and even worse the company’s data may now reside in another country.
However, the reality is that the real nightmare for CIO’s is worrying about how they will manage IT and at the same time ensure they deliver world class services that support the business and keep pace with their competitors, not to mention the ever-increasing demands of their customers.
And all this must be achieved while at the same time leveraging technology to take advantage of the opportunities of the application economy. This latter brings major challenges for IT execs not least of which is managing legacy systems while at the same time focussing on shiny new apps that have been developed to support the goals of marketing and the business leaders.
Another important fact to highlight is that many companies simply don’t possess the best in class skills required to manage all the elements of infrastructure and systems right across the enterprise. This makes it very tough for IT execs to ensure a perfect customer experience that the business, and the app economy demands, if it is to attract new, while retaining existing, customers.
This is especially true when one considers that the quality of the service is reliant on all the old legacy systems which could be managed by vendors that have the appropriate skills to ensure the required high service levels.
The ITMaaS value proposition
The ITMaaS segment forms part of the broader SaaS world which is increasingly attractive in the midst of tough economic conditions.
ITMaaS vendors provide the essential management tools that enable users to access and view an IT environment, monitor and evaluate performance and ultimately improve the functionality of IT environments through a cloud delivery model. The ability to gain visibility into an internal IT structure and deliver the performance data is a critical component within the management process. Through ITMaaS offerings, enterprises can easily capture, analyse and monitor the risks, costs, capacity constraints and other performance metrics that help ensure the optimisation of IT resources. Moreover, ITMaaS can deliver the ability to monitor new technologies, in a seamless and time effective manner, as they are added to the stack.
Above all, leveraging IT to deliver consistent, quality customer service is pivotal to competitive advantage in the application economy where consistent, quality, customer experiences is the name of the game with one of the key goals being the acquisition of a single view of customers’ transactions.
Businesses failing to deliver the quality and consistency of experience expected by customers today are doomed to failure and they will unquestionably not survive. Customers today do not give second chances.
Customers’ service perceptions are a direct reflection on the quality of a company’s IT provision and consumers are unforgiving if exposed to erratic service experiences.
To summarise, adoption of an ITMaaS model translates into outsourcing the day-to-day administrative and operational tasks associated with the service management environment giving businesses the flexibility to adapt quickly to changing situations and technologies.
Above all, this solution empowers companies with the ability to provide incomparable service delivery to their customers which is the holy grail of all businesses today. So the bottom line is – Re-imagine your IT and how you are managing it.
