Dan spoke on a CIO-Level View of IT4IT.
IT4IT matters at C-level because it is a key tool for transitioning from project-based planning to a service-based digital product investment model. This is a key stage in the Digital Transformation journey.
Most big companies wish they were a lot better at running enterprise IT more like a business and less like an artists’ colony.
It’s the norm today for every stage of value creation in large IT shops to suffer from too much friction in teams and between processes, inadequate control metrics, brittle handoffs and unsatisfactory operational practices.
At the same time there is immense pressure to leap ahead on value, cost and speed, and to have the right position on current hot buttons such as cloud, security, DevOps and so on.
How can IT4IT help a CIO show real progress? Here are seven reasons why it’s actually a big deal:
When I show this model to pretty much anyone living in Enterprise-IT-Land, they quickly find themselves somewhere on the map. That’s a key starting point. This instant recognition is in stark contrast to esoteric models like ITIL and COBIT, which are robust, complex, very useful to experienced practitioners – and incomprehensible to most people, including most IT professionals.
Yet IT4IT is completely mappable to the more formal models needed by auditors, process engineers and tool builders. It bridges a critical semantic gap that can be the key obstacle to implementing best practice.
Corollary: The IT4IT Forum must resist the temptation to turn IT4IT into another complex, impenetrable standard. Its fundamental clarity is a great achievement.
The Open Group IT4IT Forum certainly includes vendors with a marketing agenda, such as IBM, HP, Microsoft and ServiceNow, to name a few. But none of them own it. That’s important.
The Forum also includes thought leaders from industry and government – enterprise IT experts who have a vested interest in keeping Open Group work open.
This matters because other big best practice IT models, valuable as they may be, are skewed to commercial or professional agendas, resulting in uneven depth and coverage.
At worst they are specifically designed to help salesmen lead inexperienced users down an attractive path to a particular vendor’s offering.
At best they are designed for a narrower audience than the CIO, and often gloss over anything not deeply interesting to their target group.
Try asking an ITIL practitioner which metadata should be packaged with a software release in order to facilitate automated closed-loop defect management. Ask how exactly that might be achieved in a typical application development shop – or what packaging rules are needed for a typical infrastructure engineering release. They probably won’t find the answer in their ITIL manual.
Similarly, COBIT does a fantastic job of describing every process that matters to enterprise IT, and is pretty complete when it comes to naming the important inputs and outputs – but it doesn’t tell us what they look like. It’s a great resource for anyone trying to improve IT value delivery at scale. But it is intractably skewed to the concerns of auditors.
IT4T has the right design point for IT executives charged with consistently delivering real, measurable business value.
The secret sauce in IT4IT is that it starts with value chains – a tried and true way of thinking about how value is created in all types of business.
By using a conceptual starting point familiar to every non-IT executive in a large enterprise, IT4IT from the very beginning makes sense to that audience. As IT organizations create tools, processes and investment plans based on this model, it remains easy (if done correctly) to map these directly back to enterprise strategy.
This means we can start to measure Enterprise Architecture outcomes using the only important metric for commercial organizations – dollars.
We can know what we’re talking about when we claim our IT investments have something to do with the actual purpose of the enterprise (which is never making back-office IT operations more elegant).
A recurring wistful meme in enterprise IT has been the idea of the Service.
There are lots of variations on this theme. IBM’s 20-year-old Service Oriented Architecture is a premier example of this attractive idea. The work done to implement SOA in large organizations is also a brilliant example of how hard it is to move the needle in the real world. Trying to migrate the status quo to a new paradigm is a difficult endeavor.
IT4IT gives us a fresh, comprehensible template for understanding services in the large – and in the cloud as well.
When I first showed the service delivery components of IT4IT to a seasoned traditional architect, he raised his eyebrows and said “That looks a lot like cloud,” to which I said “Yes it does.”
He wasn’t sure non-cloud apps could be delivered in that model. Actually the point is that non-cloud apps are missing something, and at worst will have to be encapsulated in a service oriented wrapper to be useful in the virtualized, cloud-centric world of modern enterprise IT.
We need a way of understanding that our work that is all about services, not about infrastructure ops examples like “provision a server.” If that’s all we needed to think about, we wouldn’t need service catalogs or IT4IT – or architecture, for that matter. We need to think about everything consumed by IT customers as a service.
Then the world starts to change.
To make all this stuff work — things like automated closed-loop defect management, DevOps, effective metering and usage monitoring, real complexity management, traceability from demand signal to runtime stack – we need a single language to describe all the information exposed across different parts of the value chain.
Only if all those bits of data fit into a single, well-ordered conceptual model, can we start to replace artistry and tribal knowledge with consistent automated processes.
Most big IT shops don’t have this today.
Why is it so hard to know how the production environment maps back to business users and their interests? One reason is that our language changes so much as the original idea wends its way through the transformations along the value chain.
The logic of IT4IT demands a common data model across the whole span of IT value delivery. By adding a consistent horizontal semantics to the vertical semantics of things like ITSM, we really can begin to get control of the whole business of IT.
The fact that IT4IT also is inherently tied to enterprise value chains and strategies means that the semantics of the operating model, even as we drill down into the details, should remain mappable back to real business value.
A common data model connecting a standard set of processes across the IT landscape also means that a standard set of APIs must emerge to support it.
Standards are funny things. They make operational life easier and cheaper for almost everyone by commoditizing what were once unique interfaces, metrics, and technologies. They make commercial life harder for vendors by commoditizing what were once Unique Selling Points.
In the IT tools space there will be stubborn reluctance to let go of hard-won competitive positioning, fear of lost margins and declining commercial advantage, disruption of complacency, defensive moves against existential threats to tiny empires and once-solid revenue streams.
But is it really to the advantage of tool vendors to push back on standards? Sometimes it’s essential. At other times you have to let go and move on.
IT4IT was partly developed as a roadmap for vendors who understand that they need to shift their strong resources to work more complex than building a better Service Desk.
Why? Because the world is changing: However much you love the serenity of the elves, they are still marching relentlessly to the Grey Havens and will not return.
Whose Service Desk isn’t good enough, when good enough is all you need? How does a proprietary code library survive the age of Git?
There are plenty of new opportunities for tool innovators who focus on customer value. There are enough unsolved challenges to keep them busy — and prosperous.
In the age of Cloud, DevOps, open source, virtualization and all that stuff, enterprise IT has no chance of standing still, no matter how firmly one’s feet are nailed to the data center floor.
Your competitors always seem to be cheaper, faster, better. The shadow IT factories are busy day and night. The CEO wants to know why you aren’t keeping up. It’s not an easy question.
How do you make well-governed enterprise IT cheaper, faster, more responsive – how do you make it provide better outcomes, better services, better value?
IT4IT suggests that part of the answer is to step back from the daily uproar, to apply a systems thinking / value chain lens to an undertaking that needs more than ever to be redefined primarily as an effective business service delivery engine.
It’s essential to understand and to be able to describe the transformational flow through the whole organization, to understand where the pinch points are – ineffective processes, poor signal-to-noise ratios along communication channels, lost data, lost meaning.
IT4IT is not the only template for making an IT service delivery heat map that shows the best opportunities to ease process flow, guide IT transformation, focus investments. But it has a lot to offer:
In the hands of a skilled practitioner, IT4IT is a valuable addition to the transformation tool kit.
It’s worth a look.
In my role leading work in both the Enterprise Architecture space as well as the IT Transformation space, I am frequently asked how IT4IT and TOGAF fit together, and how the Enterprise Architecture profession fits into the IT4IT context.
My experience working with clients in this space has led me to look this question from two key perspectives.
The first is from the vantage point of the CIO using IT4IT to look at his or her organization for improvement opportunities. At this level of enquiry there are two primary views: the IT Value Chain and the Level 1 Reference Architecture.
IT Value Chain
IT4IT Level 1 Reference Architecture
From this perspective, Enterprise Architecture is a small piece of the overall big picture. There are 29 functional components in the Level 1 reference architecture of which EA is simply one of many. Within the EA functional component it is appropriate to use whatever architecture framework we see fit, to guide process or best practices for Enterprise Architecture. TOGAF, along with counterparts like DODAF, FEAF, Zachman and others, simply fits into this box and needs to be integrated with other parts of the IT organization through the development of the Service Architecture.
IT4IT gives the CIO a way to look across the organization, and to assess all its functional components for quality or maturity (or whatever other factor is important) and to decide where the biggest pain points are.
IT4IT also gives the CIO a very clear way to understand the data needed to manage an IT organization and provides a framework for evaluating how well that data is flowing across the different organizational silos.
A second perspective for which IT4IT is useful is that of an Enterprise Architect.
As an Enterprise Architect, it would be my job to look across the entire enterprise. We use the Porter Value Chain here as one simple representation of a way to segment your Enterprise Architecture according to TOGAF. 
Porter’s Value Chain Model
IT is one of several areas in the business. Each of them might have an industry reference model appropriate for use for one or several of the areas. Examples include ARTS, BIAN, SCOR, VCG, APQC or many others. IT4IT in this context is simply a reference architecture for managing the Technology Development (or IT) support function.
IT4IT provides us with the details we need to truly understand how IT needs to work.
Neither perspective on how to use IT4IT is more or less important. The CIO can get significant value from using IT4IT in a top-down manner as a strategic assessment tool to drive improvement across the IT function and help transform the IT Operating Model. The Enterprise Architect can get significant value from using IT4IT in more of a bottom-up manner as a reference model to speed up architecture work and to drive vendor integration and standardization in the IT Management tool space. Regardless of whether you use IT4IT in a top down or bottom up manner, it helps to understand how the pieces fit together for you and your organization.