I've been ruminating lately about the ramifications of the coming "consumerization of IT." And if you're a CIO - you should be as well.

It's no secret we're all standing at the precipice of a major shift in technology ownership. Indeed, since 2005, Gartner has been saying consumerization of IT will be an irreversible mega trend over the next 10 years.

And I agree. In fact, consumers already have a great deal of power over how services and technologies are configured and deployed. For example, wireless innovations like the Blackberry or the iPhone are empowering the end-user/customer more than ever – which in turn, has significantly increased the expectations on the CIO from the business side. All of which means CIOs today need to be constantly connected to their customers.

Take a look at this from the other side. Say, as a customer, I go to Verizon and buy a Blackberry. I’m not only buying the device, I’m buying cell coverage and all that entails (paying for it online with a monthly fee, signing up for an insurance plan, etc.). So in point of fact - I’m actually buying a communications service that consists of multiple components, which essentially I choose based on my individual requirements. Obviously, to deliver such flexibility requires an agile IT organization. For example if I cancel a particular Verizon service, and a bunch of other customers cancel as well – the IT operations department might need to retire a number of services and servers and redeploy some staff.

Invariably then, the question becomes: how does a CIO know to do that?"

I think the perceptive CIO today must actively be seeking ways to transform their rigid, legacy-ridden infrastructures and push service based models into agile, efficient, service-driven delivery mechanisms. Such an approach should focus on using internal IT to create value-adding business services, rather than on merely optimizing legacy infrastructures, for instance.

Many call this approach "Business Service Management" (or BSM for short). Essentially, BSM manages IT according to business priorities, and involves creating a catalog of business services, and enabling the consolidation of legacy monitoring tools. BSM also automates ITIL processes and makes them available as services.

To put BSM in place, IT must consolidate the management of complex and diverse IT assets, correlate the status of business processes with the underlying IT infrastructure and applications that support them - and manage changes and demand peaks without business disruption. Further, business processes need to be automated and integrated with infrastructure and application management.

As the basis for measuring service(s) to users, IT needs mapping capabilities, processes to assess the user experience, and a Unified Service Model (USM) - the information model that provides a complete 360-degree view into IT services, mapping the relationships of the technology assets that support a business service.

With a true BSM approach in-place, CIOs can shake their uneasiness about the "consumerization of IT" and pro-actively begin to transform IT into a true source of business innovation by:

• Optimizing IT services to streamline business processes and transactions
• Consolidating monitoring processes and tools to correlate the management of infrastructure and applications to business processes and provide visibility and accountability to stakeholders.
• Reaching beyond process automation and cost reduction objectives to focus on creating new services and innovative uses of technology resources for business advantage.

For a pragmatic approach see: Business Service Management

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