Asset-less IT…What's the future of IT Service Operations’ ITAM?

I was talking with a friend about some of the changes that are impacting IT including…

- the adoption of virtualization,

- Cloud (Public, Private and SaaS),

- mobility

- and agile development efforts.

We compared notes on how each of these are directly and indirectly impacting IT Operations (as defined by ITIL, BSM, etc.) and IT Service Development (ALM, App-Dev, etc.) at many companies. We stumbled in to the concept of an Asset-less IT (no HW & SW to manage), and talked about this future role of IT.

So how did we end up at an Asset-less IT discussion? Initially, we started with a discussion on Virtualization. Outside of the many benefits of Virtualization in the data center, IT Development effort were greatly simplified (over time) as development teams “defocused” on specific hardware and OS environments and relied on Virtualization technologies to manage that layer.

And as the Cloud (in whatever flavor) emerges as a legitimate option for many organizations; development teams are relying on well documented and stable environment to make smaller apps quickly, with ongoing modifications, available more cost-effectively.

At the same time business users are quickly adopting mobile devices to be more effective and better-connected. These smaller devices and the thinner apps they run, are driving the need for more client-ready data access on different mobile devices and across a variety of networks. And like it or not, the business users are ready-and-able to download Shadow-IT apps as needed, if their own IT teams are not ready to provide services.

Finally, the nature of IT Development services has changed along with the nature of software applications…

1) OLD SCHOOL – SW was millions of lines of code, 100’s of developers working over months and years…

2) TODAY – smaller Agile development teams, work on small focused SW apps that release weekly

3) OLD SCHOOL – stand-alone SW had redundant functionality, often tied to specific DB, HW and OS

4) TODAY – the agile apps rely on more “standard” common services and automation, via virtualization or Cloud

5) And TODAY almost 80% of all IT Development services are moving to agile methodologies, continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous improvement efforts, and completing projects in a few weeks with teams routinely deploying to live environments on a weekly, or even a daily basis.

IT Asset Management and IT Change Management were defined in a different era and find it hard to track or keep pace. The trends point to a day when IT, and the SW applications, may need to be managed at the Source Code level. If a company defined its core assets as the Source Code/IP, and managed it in a way that…

- allows development teams to re-use pre-approved and security-cleared code,

- provide real-time source code access and controls, for internal and contract developers

…the company could move the organization toward an Asset-less IT Operations team leveraging the Cloud and its Source Code strategies. OK, so really it’s just pushing asset management to the source code level and tracking it into internal and externally provided services.

But we are seeing more organizations push closer to this model; collapsing IT Operations and Development services into a single DevOps staff, and setting up IP strategies that drive policies and guidelines around the use and re-use of their source code. The benefits of both efforts should create advantages for IT's reliability and business agility.