The problem with IT – Business alignment
One of the central planks of Business-IT alignment is the ability for IT to respond to change within the timescales that the business demands. Although IT transformation programmes to realign IT with business are extremely important, the reality is that at ground level, the technology mix is so complex and the processes supporting IT’s customers so manual, that delivering a service with the right configuration just takes too long.
Analysing this further, it is worth considering the application development life-cycle as a set of processes in a supply chain with IT infrastructure providing the underlying technology and operational support throughout every step of the supply chain. Although new Application Life-cycle Management frameworks and re-useable component-based methodologies have dramatically speeded up development timescales, the entire supply chain is severely slowed down through IT infrastructure manual processes. In other words IT infrastructure has become the bottleneck in the supply chain.
Imagine a car manufacturing plant where the handover at the end of each step in the supply-chain is manual and takes 4 weeks to complete. You would never see a car rolling out of the plant! Yet, this is (to a greater or lesser extent) what happens in most IT organisations in the world.
Automation is the only answer.
Reed Bunting addresses this through automating the processes that are involved in delivering the right infrastructure at the right time with the right configurations, resulting in:
- Much faster deployment of the infrastructure (orders of magnitude). One client reduced the length of time it takes to deploy a new and highly complex SOA environment from 3 1/2 days to 5 minutes
- Significant improvements in quality of service, because there is no need for manual intervention
- Significant improvements in customer services, because through self service the customer now feels in control.
Reed Bunting’s solution, which is tool agnostic and based on existing point solutions within the enterprise, links the following activities through a web-based user interface driven by the client:
- Development/Test requirements for an infrastructure component submitted via a web client
- The requirements are based on pre-packaged application stacks, from operating systems, to databases and middleware components
- The configuration parameters for application deployment typically held in CMDBs
- Automated creation and deployment of virtual platforms based on user requirements.
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