3 trench stories from the front line of IT support model transformation
We’ve been writing a lot recently about Day 2 digital transformation challenges and how they create ops headaches for IT. I’m talking about things like not having enough IT capacity to support all the product teams. Or spiralling costs. Or hitting a wall with implementing automation.
These day-to-day frustrations crop up when an enterprise is evolving into a product-based organisation and doing more cool things with tech at the edge. You can address the frustrations by transforming the IT support model so it’s ‘built for agile’.
Here’s what I mean…👇
Transforming the IT support model: What it means
Designing a ‘built for agile’ IT support model involves redefining what teams are responsible for, how they’re measured and staffed, and what related service levels should be within the context of the digitally transformed organisation.
The aim is to end up with centralised IT capabilities supported by an automation platform – so IT can scale to meet all product team needs.
But what does that look like in practice? And how does it make life easier for both IT and product teams?
Here are 3 ‘trench stories’ from the front line of IT support model transformation.
1. Enabling self-service to free up overworked IT teams
Trench story #1 is a global engineering company. They had automated 80% of provisioning but had hit a ceiling with automation – they still had delays in request-to-production and CAB meeting queues.
We automated all tasks (85!) in the development environment build process – provisioning, runbook creation and managed services onboarding.
Now, they can get fully operational development environments within 30 minutes from request approval – all part of the end-to-end automated flow covering change management, provisioning and service transition. Redundant CAB meetings have been eliminated, IT is providing managed self-service to agile teams and they’ve improved the developer experience.
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2. Aligning central IT with product teams spread out globally
Trench story #2 is consumer products. They had a geographical challenge – 200+ product teams were spread out around the world. Central IT needed an effective way to control ongoing cloud migration and transformation projects amid the varying skill levels (and languages). The aim was to enable product teams while driving tangible cost savings and optimising ways of working.
We helped set up a Migration and Modernisation Design Office that worked with individual business lines, geographies and product teams to help prepare, design and budget for upcoming activities. We used a combination of interviews, workshops and technical tooling to feed into the set-up process, ensuring the Design Office was aligned with the range of stakeholder needs.
The Design Office now helps organise ongoing transformation projects, providing a menu of available options with indicative costs, savings and improvements. This standardisation has helped central IT connect with (and maintain appropriate guardrails for) the company’s global landscape. This has then enabled central IT to more effectively support product teams at scale.
3. Standardising and automating to optimise performance, costs and security
The third trench story is a retailer. They had a heterogeneous landscape stemming from individual product teams using cloud in different ways. This made it challenging for central IT to manage from a security and performance perspective – and meant costs were higher than they needed to be. It also meant they struggled to scale new processes.
We helped them remediate and optimise applications used across more than 100 product teams, aligning them with a set of common standards and baseline principles. This provided a foundation for industrialising efficient ways of working and scaling automation.
As a result, the retailer has saved money, enhanced performance and reliability, improved security and sped up operations.
It’s surprisingly easy to get results
These 3 stories are just a selection. And if these enterprises can address their digital transformation growing pains, you can too.
It doesn’t have to involve a lengthy project either. You can get started with a POC that gives quick cost savings and automation wins, so you can get buy-in (and budget) for progressive improvements.
So what are you waiting for?
