Much has been made over the years about the importance of managing IT as a service. In reality, however, what really matters is the experience the internal or external customer has with IT. You can manage IT as a service all you want, but if all those services still wind up providing the customer with a discombobulated experience, there really isn’t much point to managing IT as a service in the first place.
The point here, says Ryan Shopp, vice president of product marketing for CA Technologies, is that CIOs need to start thinking of themselves as being the chief experience officer for their company. Most of the interactions people have with companies today are digital. But if you’re not really monitoring how all those services are being experienced by the end users, chances are you’re not really holistically managing IT. Instead, you’re probably concentrating on how each service measures up against a particular service level goal without any visibility into how the service is actually being consumed.
To gain enough visibility into the services in a way that allows IT to actually manage the customer experience, CA Technologies is making the case for a more comprehensive approach to IT management. The company today, for example, released an update to its CA Infrastructure Management software that extends the reach of the management platform out to converged voice and video networks, while also making the analytics capabilities of the platform easier to digest via a more integrated user interface. At the same time, CA Technologies also announced earlier in the week that it is acquiring Paragon Global Technology, Inc. (PGTI), a provider of software that makes it easier to visualize data residing in CA Workload Automation AE software.
This IT experience issue is coming to a head with the rise of mobile computing and the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon. Couple that with cloud computing and it becomes readily apparent that end users have options other than the internal IT department to satisfy their needs. Ultimately, that means the onus of enticing end users with memorable IT experiences that they want to use over and again is now falling squarely on the shoulders of the internal IT department.
None of that can be achieved, however, if your organization can’t actually manage IT on a truly end-to-end basis.
