Businesses today depend upon IT to drive innovation and enable accelerate competitive advantage. Increasingly cloud computing enables business to deliver new services, enter into new markets, get closer to customers, and make increasingly mobile and demanding employees more productive.
The most successful organizations use cloud technologies as a catalyst to put in place new systems and processes that free IT organizations to maximize not just operational metrics, but business results.
IT as a Strategic Partner
Innovative organizations have taken the boldest step in leveraging cloud computing to shift technologies, practices and processes, freeing resources and redirecting them to create value for the business. Doing so requires automating decades of manual processes, developing new skills and shifting roles for IT, as well as investing in key technologies.
With a flexible cloud infrastructure capable of supporting the broadest set of applications and leveraging automation to replace slow, error-prone manual processes, IT is able to make significant efficiency gains that reduce the resource requirements of existing systems and applications.
More granular financial measurements provide IT with an accurate picture of costs, delivering insights needed to support reallocation of resources to higher impact initiatives. This gives IT the power to shift the traditional IT financial model, reducing the ongoing resource commitment to support existing systems to provide investment into new services that create competitive differentiation and generate new business opportunities.
Organizationally, the cloud Center of Excellence transitions from a team of individuals within IT to the primary operating group within the IT organization. With investment in skills development in how to successfully operate cloud environments, cloud expertise becomes pervasive across the IT organization.
But the most significant change for innovative organizations is the ability of the team to contribute to the overall strategy of the business. These types of organizations are able to more effectively link costs of IT and specific outcomes, refining financial models to apply greater resources to initiatives that grow the business rather than simply maintain current operations. It is this ability to make strategic decisions based on their impact that best defines innovative organizations.
Learn about VMware's journey to IT transformation.
