Great column! I think advances in a number of exciting technologies are really coming together to help align IT and Business.

Although BPM, SOA and virtualization initiatives all help us deliver the type of services the business needs to deliver shareholder value and compete in the marketplace, they add a stunning amount of complexity. For IT, especially the Operations folks, this makes it nearly impossible to manage performance and availability to required service levels. The old paradigm of systems monitoring, event management and problem resolution will simply break under the weight of all this complexity and abstraction.

So it isn’t enough to just implement these things advances on the delivery side. We also have to prepare Operations for the change:

We have to think in terms of managing the delivery of services rather than the reliability of systems
We have to move away from labor-intensive deterministic approaches (i.e. “monitor and respond to everything”) to a “probability and priority” approach.
We have to use tools instead of labor to correlate events associate them with real problems.
We have to get out of “break-fix” mode and into a proactive and predictive Operations process paradigm.

There is no doubt BPM, SOA and virtualization are here to stay. They bring agility, alignment and efficiency to both the business side and IT. But the initiaives around these will only succeed if we bring our Operations disciplines and practices along for the ride.