Shadow Information Technology (IT)

It is an interesting social problem when there is a need within the organization and a worker makes decisions within corporate constraints that ultimately may erode some of the organization’s capability to manage the overall business from an IT perspective. Part and parcel of this problem that transpires inside a lot of companies is that workers may have an approval limit on their credit cards that allows them a $1,000 a month of spend without approvals for it. Many times, in development or test organizations, those users within the organization go to Amazon or another public cloud service, swipe a credit card and effectively light up a development or news service environment outside the corporate firewall.

“We’re in business to serve you. We have new tools, new capabilities, and a new approach to do it, using data centre automation, cloud computing, private cloud, hybrid…,”or whatever the model is. It is a new way to serve those users and have them give that money back to the organization instead of spending their dollars outside the corporate firewall or corporation. The same monthly spend can be used to make improvements that increase the agility and capability of the company that they probably have not had in the past.

Data Centre Automation and Orchestration

One thing that has become very clear through talking to our customers is that most of them are siloed in nature. When customers are looking to embrace automation or orchestration, one of the biggest challenges is their inability to go across functional silos, mainly because the tools that were purchased and are being used tend to be much siloesd. Sometimes organizationally, different groups do not like to talk to each other or deal with each other. So, when customers are trying to implement automation in cloud, one aspect with which they tend to struggle is organizational adoption. Automation depends on the ability of a given organization to adopt change

within their groups and talk across silos. Customers that have done very well breaking through the adoption barrier tend to see the biggest value and return on investment from automation or orchestration. Customers that tend to struggle going across silo do not tend to see the most value from automation or orchestration.

The way MenSagam approaches organizations that struggle to work across silos is to work with their different functional groups and understand the most important pieces they are looking to include when they implement a cloud. We can help them understand how to pull together the different pieces and parts and how to work across the different silos within the organization to drive the sorts of automation and orchestration that they want to achieve through a cloud or an automation strategy. We use that information to create road maps around how we would integrate their existing tools, automate and orchestrate their existing processes and allow them to achieve maximum value from automation.