How small business CFOs bridge the IT GAAP

Overview

A joint survey completed in 2011 by Gartner and the Financial Executives Research Foundation found that 42% of IT organizations report directly to the CFO. This number quickly jumps to 60% for smaller businesses with revenues between $50 million and $250 million. Addressing the communication, cultural and professional problems that arise from this reporting structure is difficult even for large corporate enterprises. Several articles offer advice to CFOs and CIOs on tackling this issue at the enterprise C-Level, but for small to middle market companies lacking an IT executive, this reporting structure should be approached differently due to both human and financial resource constraints.

Your IT Department's Dirty Little Secret

When you access your organization's applications such as email or financials, or use a service such as the Internet or printing, there is a lot of technology you don't see underneath. This technology is a complex stack of hardware and software working together to establish the infrastructure and platform layers, which are required to run your organization's applications and services. The infrastructure and platform layers are rapidly moving towards commoditization, and you've probably heard the terms describing this movement, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

For many small and midsized organizations this commoditization movement is your IT department's dirty little secret.

Why does IT miss getting IT right?

Sally Sue has put in five requests (3 emails, 1 phone call and 1 request passing the IT Manager in the hall) over a 3 week period to fix her desktop that crashes each time she opens her accounting application. Her issue is not a lack of response or attention from IT. Each time she has submitted a request the help desk has responded and fixed her desktop using a variety of methods such as a reinstall of the application or a reboot of her machine. Her issue is the reoccurrence of the incidents, because no one has fixed the problem.

Overview

 IT misses getting it right because they focus heavily on technical support, that is responding to the incident and addressing the incident, but fail to fix the problem. So how does IT get IT right? Through the implementation of programs that help achieve operational excellence. Operational excellence can only be achieved when the IT department executes across all three pillars of an IT environment, People, Process & Technology. Let's examine how IT typically misses within each of these 3 pillars.

Challenging the need for "The Cloud"

Technology vendors, service providers and value-added resellers (VARs) are driving the value of the cloud hard. But will moving to the cloud really help your bottom line or does it only add to someone else’s?

Who needs the cloud?

The five essential characteristics that define the cloud (see prior post Why is "The Cloud" still unclear?) introduce added capabilities for an organization, but they also introduce added cost.

Why is "The Cloud" still unclear?

After more than five years of using the term "The Cloud", technology vendors, resellers, service providers, analysts, and IT professionals still use inconsistent definitions for cloud computing (i.e. "The Cloud").  There are plenty of reasons for this lack of consistency, but the end result is confusion for many organizations seeking the benefits of cloud computing. The intent of this post is to break down cloud computing into manageable segments to provide leaders of organizations (business, education, government, etc.) a foundation to converse with IT staff, consultants and vendors on potential cloud solutions.

Establishing a Cloud Foundation

To explain cloud computing I'll use simplified definitions