IT Planning Will Never Be the Same

By Systems Management News Team

July 15, 2008 —  When was the last time a marketing person sat in on one of your infrastructure planning meetings? How about a lawyer? Vice president of business development? We’re willing to bet these folks have been slowly working their way into the IT planning process all over the world. As the Web accounts for more and more business dollars, and end user “experiences” can be directly traced to the corporate bottom line, it’s only natural that the folks upstairs are going to start paying more attention to what’s going on in their server rooms.

In the 1990s, if a company marketer had inadvertently stumbled upon an IT meeting, the result would most likely have been a supremely confused business executive. These days, it’s easier to understand how the IT structure works. Certainly, there are still many complex issues to deal with on a daily basis, but the basics of the Web—Web servers, pages and services—are now understood even by first-year MBAs.

Blame SOA. Blame service-level agreements. Blame software as a service. No matter the cause, it’s a fact that IT now is no longer just there to support the business; for many companies, IT is the business.

That doesn’t mean “aligning” business with IT. It means bringing IT into the fold with other business units, making IT an equal partner instead of a servant.

It also means that the systems managers are going to have to get their heads out of the wires and switches to learn about the business they’re supporting. A thorough knowledge of application delivery and performance will have more value if it can be coupled with an understanding of the company’s business goals and strategies. Similarly, a business executive can increase his value by taking a systems management course.

The days of discrete IT are coming to an end, and both sides need to get on board. While there still is room for debate over platform choices and network configurations, it’ll be the business, with collaboration from the IT side, that drives the decision.



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