I met with my old friend Steve Tuppen this week who is incredibly sharp with regard to driving cost savings into large IT Service Delivery Contracts. I learned a thing or two about how financial (not capability) drivers are likely to shape IT Architecture in the future. In a nutshell organisations will expect to switch IT suppliers as easily as we can switch our Electricity supplier.
This evolution may follow the following levels and I suspect most companies are still at level 2.
- Level1: Business applications mingled with lots of physical servers and storage and a whole raft of people and technology to keep it running. Not a utility model so expensive.
- Level2: Still lots of business applications but efficiency gained by virtualising applications, servers and storage. Hardware becomes more of a commodity so cost reductions realised in infrastructure.
- Level 3: Infrastructure commodities can be outsourced to a Infrastructure as a Service Partner. So now we can consider infrastructure as a utility and have the option to move our applications around to drive costs down. Likely operating with a dual supplier model here.
- Level 4: Business Architects have extracted our business processes and principles from applications and enabled business services to be delivered by a Software as a Service provider instead of managing our own applications.
Exciting times ahead, however I am not sure what we are all going to do once most organisations are at level 4.