The Information Systems Department is constantly evolving, according to the growth of the company, internal changes, and user needs… In order for the production of services and the efficiency of IT teams to remain in good shape, it is necessary to be agile and proactive.
IT department: a changing environment
Mergers / acquisitions, internal movements, infrastructure changes, the need to process new services… The life of a company is rich due to its different evolutions. This inevitably impacts the IT department, who must meet both the needs of the business lines and the requirements of management.
IT services evolve in a particularly changing environment, impacted by strategic decisions, technological changes and changes in everyday life (infrastructure changes, the arrival of an employee, cybersecurity, the deployment of business applications, etc.). Indeed, IT today is impacted by many decisions, either directly or indirectly.
When IT isn’t equipped to keep pace with the changes inherent in the business activity, it can struggle to stay the course. Some symptoms are indicative of the challenges facing administrators in an increasingly complex IT environment:
- Difficulty in tracking assets (costs related to changes, abandonment of certain business solutions, changes in the organization, links between components of the information system, etc.)
- The inability to detect or resolve problems, technical alarms or user requests.
- The multiplicity of management tools that complicate the deployment and configuration of devices and applications and thus impact users, making it difficult to adapt to change.
It’s mathematical: as IT resources grow, the bandwidth available within IT teams decreases.
The IT teams are not always prepared to face increasing complexity, and therefore face the full force of a reality that is difficult to admit: beyond certain levels, they are no longer able to adapt to new needs, nor to meet the expectations of users…
CIO: the need to adapt quickly
A company expects its IT department to continuously adapt the means implemented to support internal changes and keep up with growth. There is no way they can wait several months to have new tools or materials deemed useful: the time has come for immediacy. IT must be prepared to respond to any type of solicitation. In a word, they must be agile.
The agility of the IT department makes it possible to meet real challenges of productivity, performance and user satisfaction. Having a good ability to adapt means being able to react to changes and control them, to make them a real vector of efficiency.
| Focus on the concept of agility Agile methods were first created as part of software development. They were introduced to simplify long and heavily documented processes to make it possible to accelerate the design of software solutions or new functionalities. Their principles are based on commitments made over short cycles, with objectives reassessed each period and immediate consideration of emerging challenges. Since then, the “Agile” philosophy has spread widely, to invest in IT service management (ITSM). A natural transposition, as IT departments must work flexibly to support business processes and the quality of the services provided. The agility of companies is now largely based on the proactivity of IT: the performance of its technologies, the efficiency of its processes, its ability to implement new digital tools… |
Ideally, adaptability should be done at two levels: on the business side and on the information system (IS) side.
- On the business side, you must be able to adapt the services offered to the specificities of the company, to customize them to deal with transversal needs or specific to different professions. In a distribution network, for example, this will be the possibility of processing a request to set up the IT resources (software and infrastructure instances, network connections) necessary for the opening of a new point of sale.
- On the IS side, flexibility is necessary to ensure efficient service and maintainability of systems that are constantly evolving: evolving IT resources must not create dysfunction within the organization. For example, this will be an upgrade of an ERP software version, or the switching of applications to SaaS mode.
An agile IT department is a guarantee of performance for companies that want to stay competitive, by quickly adapting to opportunities and threats.
This flexibility is only possible by adopting an ITSM tool that is both structuring and flexible.
Sales and Marketing Director at Combodo
