The changing role of IT: part I

The role of IT has never been more important for a service provider than it is today.

The definition of Information Technology in the past was the internal functions to make the company work like billing systems, operation systems to provision and assure services, and the network and desktop infrastructure for employees. Today however in the on demand, always available world, Information Technology for a service provider has evolved into a customer facing role and also how service providers will differentiate from others going forward.

A CIO’s challenges were already pretty hard, but another level of complexity has been added these past few years. Not only does the CIO have to support the existing set of applications and infrastructure, generally, with a decreasing budget, the role now includes an expectation to expose some of that application functionality to end-users to enable them to self-provision, self-order, and monitor the services they receive from the service provider.

Also making this easy to do, the look and feel, and the overall user experience is now venturing into the marketing domain. This is another way a service provider can differentiate its service offerings.

Those are some serious challenges, and in my next blog, I’ll offer some thoughts as how to address some of these challenges.