Insights into coming evolution of IT management

DUBLIN, IRELAND: Research and Markets has announced the addition of IT Management: Necessary Evil to Business Process Necessity to its offering.

Historically, IT management was viewed as an arcane art somewhere between esoteric science and mysticism. This resulted from the state-of-the-art of data processing technology which demanded a pathologic focus on the components and infrastructures. IT staff worked on exorbitantly expensive equipment in special glass-walled rooms and spoke in strange terms such as “kilobytes” and “CPU seconds”.

Much of the mystery is now gone from IT. Many IT management organizations have evolved to focus on partnering with their business unit “customers”. However, while business managers today appreciate the impact that IT management can have on their individual objectives, IT management is typically still perceived as a “necessary evil”.

Continuing and expanding adoption of a series of disruptive influences in IT and business -– Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Open Source software, and a virtualized or Utility Computing infrastructure --  are necessitating evolution in IT management. The impact of these disruptive influences is magnified by the increasing dependence of business processes on IT.

The challenge for IT managers is to bring their processes and staffs into the spotlight and be recognized as a valuable business necessity by becoming a key player on the business service management stage. The alternative is to be caught in the headlights and become road-kill along the business process management highway.