By Ramasundar Ramani and KK Krishnakumar

The concept behind IT-as-a-Service is to let business units order what they want through a central service catalog portal and let IT use more standardization and automation to respond faster and more efficiently. To enable this seamless, self service, we have had to put together the right tools necessary to make it all happen smoothly, from the first portal click to the provisioning of the service to the final user invoice.

Prior to IT-as-a-Service, if an individual employee or someone within a business unit wanted to order a service, they needed to call an ‘agent’ from the Business Technology Group in IT, fill out a form or pursue the process via the IT Central web page. From there, product managers and developers would need to get involved to deliver the service. Now, EMC IT has built a private cloud and is currently populating it with services, allowing business unit users to navigate through the service catalog portal and order a service.

We have been assembling the tools to achieve this end-to-end process, using a combination of readily available tools on the market and our own development expertise and technology. The goal over the next few months is to create a seamless process for this new user-focused IT delivery model. But longer term, we will be forging the framework for a new way of doing business in IT ­— one with increasingly stringent service level expectations for agility and efficiency.

IT-as-a-Service Program

Continue reading →

Defining costs inspires IT conversations

By Neil Thibodeau, Director of Service Delivery for IT

Creating a financially transparent IT delivery system, in which business units can see—and potentially pay for—the amount of services they consume, isn’t just about costs. It’s about new conversations and choices.

In fact, showing back and charging back IT service costs is a crucial component to restructuring EMC IT operations to an IT as a Service model.

Up until now, business units at EMC had little break down of what they spend on IT services. The email services, desktops, collaborative tools and test environments used were, for the most part, funded through a non-specific IT budget. Even in cases where business units were aware of certain costs associated with certain applications they owned, they did not have visibility into the cost break down of such services. Expenses for things like labor, telecom, software, licensing, or depreciation were not included.

While that may have meant that business units didn’t have to concern themselves about the details of IT investments, it also meant that they often lacked control over their access to IT resources that could potentially benefit their operations. That access was indirectly limited by the CIO office, which in traditional fashion, sought to keep the IT budget from increasing. In turn, EMC IT was focused on meeting growing IT demands from business units with a limited budget rather than responding to the business’ needs.

Continue reading →

With cloud computing and IT as a Service opening new doors, IT organizations are becoming more nimble in meeting the needs of the business units they serve by leveraging a more standardized, highly automated and agile infrastructure. This evolution provides an opportunity for IT to forge a new, more open dialogue with its business customers in determining how best to use these new capabilities.

Since IT as a Service is based on supply and demand, this new dialogue with the business needs to start with an emphasis on financial transparency. It is essential that the CIO and his or her team build a system that shows the true usage and cost breakdown of the IT services to be able to ‘showback’ and even chargeback the business for what they consume.

After all, continuing to operate IT services under a lump-sum budget without sharing expenses and options with the users is like running a household on a chunk of money without knowing what the individual bills cost. You can’t make informed choices about increasing your home’s energy efficiency if you have no sense of the monthly electric and heating bills. And how can you weigh the value you are getting from cable television, internet services, and cell phone contracts if those expenditures are melded with other utilities, trash pickup and snow plowing costs?

Continue reading →