Posted on Thursday, September 8, 2016 in third party maintenance
The need to grow and evolve technology quickly has helped to create a two speed approach to corporate IT. Agile development and deployment meant that businesses typically operated two teams to accommodate this approach – one tasked with maintaining a stable operating environment for line of business applications, and a second for carrying out the experimental, innovation projects.
Within the IT industry, the day-to-day tasks are considered far less “sexy” than the cutting-edge experimental side of the business. So as certain skills became more in demand, IT specialists typically gravitated towards roles on the “fast” track team, making it much harder to recruit high calibre candidates for the unglamorous roles behind the front lines.
BCG declares the death of two-speed IT
A think piece published by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) suggests that businesses need to reject the two speed IT approach, adopting instead a program of constant innovation in both front and back office operations. Failure to adopt agile techniques across all operations will, they claim, create operational and development bottlenecks that hold the organisation back.
This call for a break-fix approach to IT operations is at odds with corporate needs however. One of the CTO’s key responsibilities is to de-risk IT operations, not introduce factors that have the potential to cause potentially massive disruption. For many businesses, the two speed IT delivery model is ideal.
Beating the skills gap
Maintaining the status quo resolves nothing in terms of skills shortages however – businesses still struggle to source the specialists they need to drive development and keep the lights on.
One way to address the issue is to outsource as many of the “unsexy” tasks as possible. Keeping the corporate storage hardware managed and maintained is considered unglamorous, but partnering with CDS will help to plug the skills gap. Our OEM-trained engineers have at least 15 years of hands-on experience supporting storage arrays, doing so for some of the world’s largest brands.
With CDS taking care of your storage operations, the hunt for the highest calibre candidates is greatly simplified. With only the sexy roles left to fill, attracting highly skilled employees will be much easier. And by choosing a third party maintenance provider, you will also make significant savings on the OEM’s support contract costs too.
So is two speed IT really dead? Not at all. In fact, it still has a very valuable role to play in businesses where reliability is more important than bleeding edge innovation at the back-end.
To learn more about how CDS can help with your two speed IT strategy, please get in touch.
– See more at: http://www.cds.net/blog/2016/09/two-speed-it-is-dead/#sthash.50ORONZM.dpuf