It is important to foster collaboration between IT teams

"Many organisations are struggling and wondering how best to organise their IT organisation. Both government and business want to make their IT more agile and responsive at lower costs while reducing risks. This is where the latest version of The Open Group's IT4IT standard offers a solution." This says DevOps and IT4IT Architect Rob Akershoek of DXC Technology

The newest version of IT4IT standard helps with optimizing the IT chain

Companies have different challenges and thus more and more components to manage. Akershoek: "Many organisations are redesigning the IT function, agile development, scaling models, DevOps and continuous delivery. At the same time, many applications are moving to the Cloud such as IaaS or SaaS models and have to deal with many different vendors. As a result, processes and tools are often fragmented. Moreover, silos from development to architecture and from programme management to risk management are emerging in organisations. The challenge is to improve this."

Although there are many initiatives to improve the IT delivery process, such as CICD pipeline, Test automation, Security Operations, Self-service portal or chain monitoring (AIOps), according to Akershoek, the coherence between all these building blocks is often missing. And that's where IT4IT offers the solution. "IT4IT is the standard for managing the digital organisation. It is actually a framework that answers questions about how to set up a modern IT organisation and which capabilities (and integrations) are needed to do so. Organisations use it as a blueprint to arrive at streamlining and automating IT processes," he explains.

Faster, better, cheaper and more secure

In October, version 3.0 was released, which focuses even more on the integrated chain, consisting of seven IT value streams. Akershoek explains: "It is not new that the IT organisation is under pressure. But it is new that everything has to come together now. It has to be faster, cheaper, safer and it should also provide a better customer experience. Therefore there is an increasing focus on optimising the integral IT supply chain to improve the entire customer journey and customer experience, instead of optimising sub-areas. Many organisations do not even realise that internal silos have been created. For instance, each business unit has its own way of working and is using different IT tools. That pattern needs to be broken. In the new version of IT4IT there is more focus on that.

Mostly, IT4IT is used as a tool to map the current situation and get a common picture. "This is what is needed, here I am and these are the gaps, it provides an analysis of IT value streams. It is particularly suitable for organisations and companies that have become increasingly dependent on well-functioning IT to achieve their business objectives. Besides companies, such as Rabobank and NN Group, IT4IT is also gaining traction in the public sector, such as at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration and the Sociale Verzekeringsbank (SVB). Such organisations have a complex application landscape with many different IT teams and suppliers. IT4IT is used to optimise the entire IT value chain across Development and Operations," says Akershoek.

IT4IT helps to take the maturity level of companies to the next level. "For example, ING Bank is using IT4IT in their Agile and DevOps transformation to arrive at a standard DevOps tooling blueprint. With this, they want to automate more tasks and promote collaboration between teams. Shell has used IT4IT to achieve a data-driven IT organisation globally, to rationalise the application landscape and achieve significant cost savings. The Dutch Railways (NS) again deploys IT4IT as a blueprint for IT information provision. In the end, it's always about optimising the chain."