Can IT Cope With Empowered End-Users?

End-users are not unreasonable. They understand that a process like tracking the impact of a trade promotion across several marketing and sales channels is never going to be as simple as using Google to find out what happened to a friend from high school. There are complexities to business tasks that just are not going to go away and cannot be made simple.

The empowerment is worth the messes?

Is it always guaranteed that the empowerment is worth the messes? How can an empowered world of research be managed in an environment where policies and regulations must be followed? The way forward is not clear.

The first big change that IT will have to undergo is to move away from just monitoring IT assets like storage, servers, networking devices, and PCs, to monitoring the applications on them. Right but, IT monitoring is nearly completely separated from application monitoring. Even with in IT monitoring, assets are monitored and managed separately much of the time. The dominant products in this space like BMC ProactiveNet, Hewlett Packard’s Business Service Management suite, and IBM’s Tivoli are all attempting to create one one view of the data center and all the assets. Application monitoring is starting to show up in these products. Products like Quest Software’s Foglight are attempting leapfrog the dominant vendors and incorporate advanced modeling of the application on top of an integrated monitoring suite.

The second big change that IT must prepare for is to track the environment on which all of these applications run, which will as well be increasingly in accordance with end-user control. Cloud computing means that lines of business will be shape their own IT far more than they are however. They will create and control instances of applications to meet their own needs. Some will run via Software as a Service. Others will run on public cloud resources. IT will often be informed of these applications afterwards they have been deployed now IT will on the whole become responsible for their quality and compliance with policies and regulations. When you add to this mix the explosion of mobile devices and app stores with a new generation of empowered applications, the locked down data center becomes a much smaller part of what IT has to manage.

Mark Shoemaker, Executive Program Manager for Cloud Computing, HP Software, predicts that IT will have to become much more like a supply chain. “We all know supply chains don't work on non-standard elements and non-standard processes,” said Shoemaker. “You have to allow a lot of flexibility now also be able to control what's in that chain so you can have reproducible quality. That has been a challenge for most IT shops and could be a barrier to adopting cloud computing.”

IT departments that prepare for this new world and get it right will make a massive positive impact on their business. They will ensure that empowerment it all its forms becomes leads to higher and higher levels of performance, not larger and larger messes.

Dan Woods is chief innovation officer and editor of CITO Innovation, a firm focused on the needs of CTOs and CIOs. He consults for many of the companies he writes about. For a problem statement that explores the scope of systems needed to manage an empowered end-user base please visit Integrated Operational Monitoring at CITOResearch.com.