SOA, Shared Services, Business, Managers, Maintenance

SOA and shared services key to freeing IT managers from routine maintenance

20 Dec 2006 | (Survey)

A recent study has found that IT managers across Europe are so burdened with the routine maintenance of their existing IT infrastructure, that they are not able to take advantage of innovative IT services that can drive down costs, automate IT management and free up resources that will help drive better business results.

The in-depth survey, commissioned by HP and conducted by Benchmark Research, consulted 700 IT managers across eight European countries in late 2006.

Results show IT departments are attempting to be more aligned with the needs of their businesses to help drive better business performance and meet fast-changing business requirements -- a trend reflected by 75 percent of respondents. However, the survey reveals that the majority of respondents are mainly focused on "making IT work."

IT managers responded that their key pressures and concerns were related to the operation of the existing IT infrastructure: security, instability, cost of downtime and 24/7 availability, as well as their capacity to meet user demands and requests from the business.

The findings represent a potential gap in expectations; whereas IT managers are commonly expected by their businesses to drive costs down, enable change and drive business value, they actually find themselves frequently caught up in the resolution of day-to-day operational issues.

Indeed, day-to-day operation costs are the fastest-growing line item in many IT budgets. A large percentage of IT spending can be consumed by necessities such as maintenance, upgrades and migration, leaving only a small fraction for initiatives that can enhance the business value of IT.

"When IT organizations are caught up responding to operational issues and increasing demands from the business, they are forced to act reactively, which results in spiraling complexity across the IT environment," said Tino Canegrati, vice president and general manager, EMEA, HP Services. "IT organizations need to find a balance between maintenance and innovation and unlock the resources from operations and redirect them to higher added value activities."

Respondents said that on average 32 percent of savings made by their departments would be re-invested back into IT, demonstrating some understanding by the business that progress and innovation in IT is central to achieving long-term business growth.

"IT departments should target their investments at driving standardization, virtualization and automation to create what we call an Adaptive Infrastructure," added Canegrati. "This, together with a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and a shared services operating model, allows organizations to operate IT as a service rather than a fixed cost, freeing up resources and providing a much more flexible service to the business."

And yet, overall, awareness of SOA and shared services in the survey was still low, with only 31 percent of respondents saying that they were very or fairly familiar with SOA and with 48 percent saying so for shared services.

"What really struck me about the research was that the IT managers repeatedly scored medium to very high concern on a large number of questions -- particularly areas that you would associate with core maintenance," said Paul Watts, associate director, Benchmark Research. "Almost regardless of organization size or industry sector, maintenance accounts for a very sizeable share of the IT budget across Europe."

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