A future look at IT management

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

In a recent interview, Jimmy Harris, managing director of cloud computing at Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, shared his thoughts on how the job of IT management will change over time as enterprises take a more services-centric view of their worlds. His advice in a nutshell:

If you've got a penchant to know everything about anything, then you best shake it. And, likewise, polish your IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-like service management knowledge and business acumen.

Here's why, he explains. As more robust cloud services bubble up, abstraction of infrastructure will become the IT endgame. "Enterprises won't be managing infrastructure from an operational and service delivery perspective but essentially acquiring it as services," he says.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

In a recent interview, Jimmy Harris, managing director of cloud computing at Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, shared his thoughts on how the job of IT management will change over time as enterprises take a more services-centric view of their worlds. His advice in a nutshell:

If you've got a penchant to know everything about anything, then you best shake it. And, likewise, polish your IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-like service management knowledge and business acumen.

Here's why, he explains. As more robust cloud services bubble up, abstraction of infrastructure will become the IT endgame. "Enterprises won't be managing infrastructure from an operational and service delivery perspective but essentially acquiring it as services," he says.

As that happens -- and certainly this won't be an overnight occurrence but an evolutionary process -- fewer bodies are needed for maintenance, enhancements and operations, Harris says.

From engagements at forward-thinking clients, what Accenture sees is a maturing of roles and technologies focusing on ITIL-like processes such as service management, governance, service integration, master data management and, newly emerging, service aggregation, Harris says.

"They've got to be able to work with third-party service providers for end-to-end performance management across a suite of technologies or applications. We'll see an emphasis on supplier management, being able to manage the multiple suppliers that provide these various services in a way that makes sense to the business. And increasingly, 'IT' folks will need even more skills than do today in business process management, understanding the business in which they operate in and how technology can drive innovation in that business," he explains.

And this doesn't mean bringing in a new set of monitoring tools to manage the services, Harris adds. That's not future-think.

"IT's job will be to define the level of performance expected from service providers and be able to demonstrate that they're in fact meeting those performance levels -- but not necessarily doing the management and monitoring itself," he says. "IT has to get out of the mindset that it's going to create some sort of overarching and duplicative layer of delivery management because that's what is done today.

"We have to get people out of the mindset of doing day-to-day operational delivery tasks and instead have them look forward and be able to say, 'OK, I'm going to deliver this sales force application as a service -- what does that mean and what pieces have to fit together? Do I source from a third party or internally to be able to deliver the amount of functionality and performance needed to meet the business requirements and, in turn, what does that mean?'"

It comes down to this: "IT will be the aggregator, assembler, tester and, to a certain extent, deployer of technology on behalf of the business, but won't necessarily build or operate those technologies and applications itself," Harris says.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.