Standardizing IT services
Good old days, there was nothing as mass production. Everything was produced on need and bartered. Industrial revolution brought mass production into picture and products and services were made available at large scale to public. Manufacturing moved to high degree of repetitive processes and better and better quality due to proven and tried processes.
Then came Information technology and automation at any cost became the rule. Expensive computing devices and even more expensive consultants started finding a lot of takers. Several companies who wanted to take advantage of first movers in technology took huge risk and cost and rest is history.
Technology is no more an overhead but essential and integral part of every business and individual. However, the process of mass production and process optimization has not yet been achieved by users to their benefit. Still, there is no standard proven process to estimate wasted IT efforts and benchmark the best processes. CIOs fail to understand that innovation has been happening rapidly in technology but not in business processes. The unfortunate part is that in most cases technology advancement has been the key reason for excess spend in IT. These advancements do not effect business in getting more money in the same proportion, but the race to move into new technology has created more pains than gains for organizations.
The wisdom of the IT business community should be to spend full time and energy in making the processes robust and outputs standardized. Educating business users in helping them to follow standards and less of adhoc would help IT reduce overall cost of IT for any organization in a big way.
