IT as a Service: what are the challenges companies are facing?

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Although the traditional IT operating model (data center, infrastructure layer, security, application development) is not yet a dinosaur, now we observe a need of IT departments to reorganize to an IT-as-a-Service construct. This shift is mainly driven by the fact that the classic IT model doesn´t provide IT services which enable businesses to remain competitive. The demands now are for business value and a greater speed at which IT can make changes to meet the business needs. Therefore, more and more companies are rethinking this model and organize IT on a completely different basis.

According to Mr Štrba (Merck Sharp & Dohme), as a frequent initiative during last two decades, we can observe a big shift to outsourcing - use of external vendors who are providing a full spectrum of service in IT. In some cases, such vendors present a step into full solution development, implementation and responsibility. The result is that original company is losing control on solution architecture, vendor is dictating prices for service and these prices are very often higher than a cost of internal specialists.

“A company becoming hostage of vendors is not un-common scenario. We´ve seen cases like that in Prague,” said Mr. Richard Penson (Axians redtoo), the Chairman of AmCham IT Committee.

"I see that in IT as a Service it´s very important to balance ratio between insourcing and outsourcing capacity. The best solution is to keep solution ownership internally and invest to own resources to control it,“ claimed Mr. Štrba during our roundtable discussion. „Such an arrangement will allow to fully control solution development and at the same time give the flexibility to scale usage of outsourced specialists," he continued.

IT departments can assemble optimal components and make them as responsive as possible within a company. However, what remains crucial is to align the new components and technologies with the business needs. For this purpose, it´s reasonable to hire Chief Technology Officer (CTO) which presents a bridge between the core IT team and business owners. Unlike IT Manager, CTO has to be part of the company decision board. According to Mr. Štrba, it should be a senior person with a complex understanding of wide aspect of IT and in parallel needs to perfectly understand core business of company. Such person should play important role in coordinating business needs with IT services. Unfortunately, the positon of CTO tends to be missing in companies as it´s very expensive to hire such a professional.

In current more inter-connected world, employees can access services through an array of channels, stay in touch around the globe and consume and share information anytime, anywhere. As well as IT departments have to evolve, so do all companies ‘employees who need to be educated about new technologies which are bound to use while working.

“The lack of knowledge is the biggest problem, as well as a distrust to new technologies. Big part of my work is educating,” claimed Mr. Bechynský (Microsoft). From his experience, an adoption of new technologies, specially of those which need a big mind shift, is very slow. Employees usually don´t have spare time at work to study and don´t want to take classes during their free time which makes it complicated.

As stated by Mr. Štrba, the way how to educate more people inside of companies – rather than using traditional training methods -  could be implementation of so-called champions. Establishing of a group of people who are open to test new ideas, provide feedback and, most importantly, play the role of evangelists in order to share their experience with others and explain how to solve challenging issues.

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