ORLANDO -- IT can no longer live in the past, according to Gartner, which says infrastructure and operations management professionals should begin the process of overhauling outdated IT processes and technologies to help enable their organizations to become the agile service providers businesses demand today.

"IT modernization is the escape route from the accidental architecture of 20th century IT. Every company is dealing with the history of IT," said Gartner Fellow Andy Kyte during the kick-off keynote presentation Monday at Gartner's IT Infrastructure, Operations and Management Summit 2008. "Some fundamental change is needed. I don't think we can carry on the bad habits and siloed decisions of the past. I'm looking for infrastructure and operations to begin the process of transforming IT."

Kyte explained if IT is waiting on the business to share its long-term plans, it will be waiting for some time. He said IT needs to initiate the change that ultimately will help the organization better align with business needs and provide the agility and support businesses require during times when long-term planning isn't always possible.

This fundamental change begins with how IT acquires and maintains technology, Kyte explained. Until now companies measured success of an IT purchase on return on investment, or ROI; Kyte contended that IT should now value its investments based on a different metric: return on assets. ROA would enable IT organizations measure success based on the return it gains from assets already deployed in the infrastructure and help IT better plan for future assets going forward.

"We still have IT organizations obsessed with acquiring new stuff. We need to get obsessed putting well-defined business processes in place to make us better at managing what we've already got," Kyte said. "We see people putting money into products and solutions that are clearly dying. Instead of investing in them, they should be investing in migrating off of them."

Yet moving from ROI to ROA would require IT shops to reinstitute a strategic planning officer who does more than allocate funds tactically, but rather devises short- and long-term goals for IT assets and organizations. Instead of viewing some IT investments as short-term fixes, Kyte said, IT needs to see the cost and time investment that is truly associated with every IT purchase.