In Part 1 of APMdigest's exclusive interview, Jean-Pierre "J.P." Garbani, VP, Principal Analyst serving Infrastructure & Operations Professionals at Forrester, discusses his new report: Transform Infrastructure And Operations For The Future Technology Management Cycle.
APM: In the report, you explain that IT is entering a new phase called the Business Technology Era. What is the Business Technology Era?
JP: Business becomes so deeply embodied in technology, and the technology so deeply embedded in the business, that IT needs to be managed quite differently.
The tipping point for this new state of technology and technology management arrives as technology's impact on business results becomes readily evident and only measurable in business terms. Forrester calls this state, built on and emerging from the original IT, business technology (BT), defined as pervasive technology use that boosts business results.
APM: How is the relationship between business and technology changing?
JP: As technology matured and brought new capabilities to customers, business support evolved from the simple administration of enterprises' finances and production to the administration of sales to today's focus on the customer. Each of these steps in the business-technology relationship marked a deep transformation in the way enterprises and technology management were organized.
APM: What is driving this change?
JP: This transformation is based on a deep evolution of technology:
1. Universal access to information from mobile devices.
2. The ability to collect myriad of information, understand customer behavior and analyze it (big data).
3. The ability to quickly respond to customer demand with rapid application development supported by an immediate sourcing of abstracted infrastructure (cloud) and the ability to quickly and automatically deploy these applications (DevOps).
APM: How will IT have to change to face this new environment?
JP: We believe that we are entering a new evolution cycle that will deeply transform IT into a completely different model of business integration. In this new era, workers still need access to devices to do their jobs and applications still need computing platforms, storage, and networks to run. But they may not need the Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) organization to provide them. Eventually, IT will have to make room for business technology (BT) and require a new operating model of high business integration.
APM: What do you mean by “high business integration”?
JP: High business integration means that, although BT is mostly represented by systems of engagement, systems of record (IT) need to provide a foundation to make services relevant to the customer. Thus responding well to business BT demand implies that IT (systems of records) reacts also to these demands and does not drag the whole thing down. Hence the higher integration with the business.
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