Digital Transformation & the Evolution of the Modern IT Team

Businesses are transforming like never before. Not long ago, innovation only moved as fast as infrastructure let it. If a business wanted to chase a new opportunity, it meant overhauling on-premises infrastructure to support that new initiative. Thanks to modern advances like the cloud and hybrid data centers, companies can transform on the fly. Major innovation can be triggered with little more than a credit card.

We call this shift Digital Transformation and it is about more than changing traditional IT managed technologies. It has changed what it means to work in IT. Teams that adapt will help their organizations find new ways to succeed for years to come. Those who can’t adjust risk having to watch from the sidelines as the business takes matters into its own hands.

Before Digital Transformation, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) was the way things were done in IT. ITIL provided a tight framework for managing IT resources and services. It worked like this: Say an end user needed a new program on his or her computer. Under ITIL, the user would submit a ticket that would then go into a queue. Every so often, the user would be emailed progress updates. At the end of this process, the user would get his or her software. Meanwhile, the CIO had a way to watch over IT resources from a high level.

ITIL may get results in an efficient and standardized manner, but it is also rigid and event-oriented. Following through on it takes the strict focus of entire IT departments, leaving no room for creativity or innovation. ITIL often came down to: “Here’s your framework. Stick to it. End of discussion.”

If you think about it, the inflexibility of ITIL is the exact opposite of what we’re seeing with Digital Transformation. The goal of Digital Transformation is enabling IT to provide outside the box value. In an organization that has embraced this way of thinking, the scenario above would have played out very differently.

With the flexibility of Digital Transformation, if an end user needed a piece of software, they would loop in IT, get the go-ahead, and obtain it themselves.