The new IT manager, part 2: new challenges for the IT organization

1. Summary

Information technology managers and their staff are facing unprecedented challenges to their traditional roles and responsibilities as the primary providers of business computing resources. Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT are not only disrupting how IT departments provide services but are also changing which assets they procure, develop, manage, monitor and support. IT used to be able to dictate not only which computing assets would be used by employees but also how they would be used. Those days are numbered.

Part 1 of this three-part report described and quantified the cloud, mobile and consumerization trends, demonstrating that they are now real, growing rapidly and perilous to ignore. This second part investigates the actual and potential impacts of these trends on IT departments and their managers. Part 3 presents actionable strategic options for IT managers to deploy in response to the new reality of corporate computing they face.

The impacts of cloud, mobile and consumerization are combining to create another force that is overwhelming many IT departments: complexity. In this report, we will examine several types of complexity in the business IT environment, including:

• Complexity of devices and applications as well as physical and virtual computing environments.
• We will discuss the related challenges for IT staff of managing, monitoring and supporting computing assets in an increasingly complex environment.
• Finally, we will add the ultimate level of complexity — the unknown — to the discussion as we look at the growing use of shadow IT in businesses and how that is making IT workers’ jobs seem impossible.