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3 ways your IT department needs to change — because it's 'change or die'

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IT operations are vital to a company's success, but departments are under increasing pressure to simplify and streamline their resources. Because corporations are able to get IT-as-a-service through virtualization and the cloud, they can now outsource many processes and upgrades, which reduces equipment costs and maintenance fees.

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This can lead to fewer headaches. But to survive, IT managers need their departments to be just as agile and dynamic as the competition. Below are three points managers should bear in mind, according to John Gentry, VP of marketing and alliances at IT performance management company Virtual Instruments. Gentry, a 20-year veteran of the field, says IT still has a great deal to offer, but managers have to adapt to the seismic changes happening throughout the entire industry.

"At its most basic, it's change or die," Gentry says. "You're going to be rendered obsolete if you don't start competing."

1. Think of your company as your customer.

Chances are, your IT department is overly siloed. Maybe there's a project in the works, and the network and storage teams aren't collaborating on an ongoing basis. Or maybe the applications team hasn't been consulted on a project from the early planning stages.

The older, siloed model (which describes many IT departments) might have once worked, but today teams excel when they're centralized and working toward one goal: delivering customer service at a level that far exceeds anything generally available through the internet. 

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Your competition is virtualization and the cloud, but you can fight them with agility and service. Your teams are going to have to collaborate, which may require reorganization and rethinking of processes. Gentry says the whole department will need one, overarching goal: "to think of itself as having just one client" — that is, the corporation itself.

2. Become like your competition.

As Gentry puts it, "Faster, simpler, and cheaper always wins." Virtualization and the cloud are winning because they're easy and seamless. But for IT departments to stay in business, they'll need to think like virtualization and the cloud. They'll need to act quickly, and keep things simple and fast.

The usual IT department is mired in projects. "Say I'm a business manager for a bank and I've been tasked with introducing a new app," says Gentry. "After I've figured out how to build it, I'd go to my internal IT. I'd ask them to provision the team with further resources and all the associated requirements, such as server network storage. And then, after several other steps, I'd put through a request that my project be provisioned for production... Or, maybe, I'd just do this: log on to Amazon and swipe my credit card. I'd get server network resources on-demand and start developing the same day. And if I needed more resources, I just pay more for it." 

To change, IT managers shouldn't ask their businesses to tell them what kind of server they need. "That isn't their problem," Gentry says. Managers should instead deliver a flexible solution for any problem. They should ask the client what their goals are. If the goal is to produce an app, your department should ask such things as how secure it needs to be, given the existing budget.

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To provide a customer-centric service, IT managers "will have to stop looking at the trees and start looking at the forest," Gentry says. It won't be easy. It's a big change from the usual way things have been done.

3. Deliver the appropriate level of service.

Gentry calls this point "the critical success factor," because it's the one where IT managers can "differentiate themselves from the generic cloud." But to deliver appropriate service, IT managers will need to get their teams outside of their silos.

"You're delivering infrastructure-as-a-service," Gentry says. "You have to be able to meet the service levels that your business requires. Unless you can deliver a better service, there will be no more IT."

Departments will have to "stop thinking in terms of components, and start thinking about the overall capability needed to support any project," Gentry says. Rather than spending too much on a system that gets barely used, managers should consider the level of service needed.

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So instead of  overprovisioning, Gentry says managers should ask themselves: "Do you need this system to be always-on and resilient? Do you need massive data protection and vast recovery? Or do you need this to be available but not performance-sensitive? Once the needs are set, IT should meet those needs in a coordinated manner. 

How it all adds up.

To reach these three goals, you'll need a unified level of monitoring that will tell you exactly what your client is consuming. And you'll need to demonstrate to your client that you know exactly the level of service that your providing. That way, you can make good on your commitments.

Virtual Instruments provides clients with the deep insight and answers required to deliver a higher level of service, and better performance, at the optimal cost. The Virtual Wisdom platform helps clients understand where their money is going and to visualize their entire system-wide performance in one interface. Virtual Instruments says its customers report a 40% reduction in system-wide infrastructure costs — and that alone can make your department more competitive.

Virtual Instruments helps you to improve your service because, as Gentry says, "you're delivering infrastructure-as-a-service. You have to be able to meet the service levels that your business requires. And unless you can deliver a better service, there will be no more IT."

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This post is sponsored by Virtual Instruments.

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