Fast IT: Accelerating Innovation in the Internet of Everything Era

By implementing a Fast IT model, IT can potentially capture a 20 to 25 percent reduction in costs. These savings can be redeployed to address new capabilities, freeing IT to innovate and become a trusted partner with the lines of business to drive business outcomes.

This evolution will enable more agility and speed for business transformation. And through the connection of people, process, data and things, it will create an organization that is truly
ready to compete in the Internet of Everything (IoE) economy.

The Internet of Everything provides a superb opportunity — and an urgent imperative — for IT to accelerate innovation. The Fast IT study surveyed 1,400 IT leaders in a representative mix of industries in five
key economies. This quantitative research was complemented by insights from key industry luminaries.

Cloud, Big Data, and other drivers of IoE create opportunities for innovation, but their added complexity can hamper it. “Shadow IT” is coming out of the shadows — in short, because users are not getting the business
solutions they need from IT, or the experiences they prefer, in the time frame that makes a given capability valuable.

Technology is not IT’s problem alone, much in the same way that talent is not solely HR’s responsibility. IT leaders understand the need to take on a service orchestrator role — but costly, unwieldy, and inadequately secured infrastructure is holding them back. Without addressing fundamental complexity challenges, any effort to drive IT transformation will be a recipe for failure.

Private cloud and public cloud each have their own economic, operational, and strategic appeal, and the best IT organizations will focus on capturing maximum value from both.

The ability to shift workloads throughout a hybrid cloudbased fabric of connections, while maintaining consistent policy, and ensuring regulatory compliance, confidentiality, and security, will underpin a new platform for service delivery enhancements, increased productivity, and business agility.

Context-aware, real-time IT services will provide the next battleground for customer mindshare, and for employee productivity.

With Fast IT, security evolves to a more platformdriven approach in which all infrastructure domains, devices, applications, and services are comingled and integrated through application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable greater intelligence, automation, and efficacy of threat detection.

CIOs must lead by example, demonstrating a “service partner” mentality so that grassroots innovations can flourish.

The IoE dividend amounts to a doubling of the IT organization’s contribution to the firm’s overall “innovation capacity.” The savings and freedom promised by Fast IT enable a shift in workforce priorities from “keeping the lights on” to aligning with LoB needs.

IT organizations should not be tempted to create new software-defined silos that mimic today’s “islands of infrastructure” and do little to address complexity, cost, or security. The IT organization has never been more integral to the company’s future, because innovating at the speed required by IoE depends upon IT’s ability to deliver capabilities that can be deployed, scaled, and customized instantly.

“Organizations really need to be thinking about that next generation of innovative technology — the level of programmability, the level of automation and service orchestration — that’s going
to enable them to scale.” (Read more: How Fast IT is a Roadmap for Turning Disruption into Strategic Advantage)