IT service delivery model: CIOs pressured to reinvent the process

Another shift in IT service delivery has technology managers making use of cloud and on-premises assets already on hand, rather than creating something entirely new.

Patrick Streck, senior director of IT services at Baystate Health, has seen this shift play out at the Springfield, Mass., hospital system as it has undergone a digital transformation in recent months. Streck described himself as a technology bartender, and it’s an apt analogy. Healthcare informatics and technology departments traditionally found themselves buying and building new, and typically siloed, systems to handle each fresh business demand. But Baystate’s evolution has tech managers taking stock of what’s on tap and blending IT resources to address emerging requirements. An existing data set may be just what the healthcare organization needs to solve a problem, and an existing system may be used in a new way to capitalize on that data set.

A significant technology gap may call for a new purchase. But Streck said Baystate’s inclination is to mix and repurpose existing assets “rather than buy something that is proprietary that generates the same data again and the system doesn’t talk and coordinate” with other hospital systems.

This style of IT is associated with a shift toward “renting” IT assets versus owning them. Ownership can lead to the “IKEA effect“ in which managers become overly invested in the technology they own and, as a consequence, resist change. In the rental approach, IT organizations can take cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to spin up test and dev environments.

“We don’t have to buy everything,” Streck said.

Delmar’s McIntyre has a similar take on ownership. He said the company’s move to purchase managed IT services from Rackspace is, in essence, a rental approach and a marked contrast to the company’s historical view that “we have to own our hardware and we have to own the software.”

Organizations like Delmar and Baystate are taking strides toward creating a new IT service delivery model. But on the whole, reinvention initiatives are works in progress. Such efforts require a host of success factors: Tech managers must obtain management buy-in, sell IT personnel on the changes and market the new look of IT to end users. To smooth the path of adoption, users need to understand how they will benefit from new measures such as self-service.

However you slice it, CIOs and senior IT managers have their work cut out for them.