Wrong Services
Does your self-service catalog offer what users really want?
Even if IT teams focus on the correct audience as the target for their self-service portals, many then fail the next test: Offering the right menu of services that answer end users' top needs. Believe it or not, most end users in your organization don't come to an ITaaS portal because they need a new VM or a certain amount of storage. (You may ultimately set up new VMs and new infrastructures for users' projects, but users don't come to a portal thinking along these lines.) Instead, users often come to a portal with a specific problem or use case they are trying to solve. They hope the portal's IT services will address it, thereby helping them do their jobs better or faster. How well do the services offered on your ITaaS portal address users' hidden problems or use cases?
Epic Fail: 5 Reasons Self-Service ITaaS Portals Are Failing
Epic Fail: 5 Reasons Self-Service ITaaS Portals Are Failing
In the age of cloud computing, much has been made of the changing face of corporate IT. Teams are no longer responsible for just a behind-the-scenes, keep-the-lights-on type of IT service. They now find themselves transforming to be a more customer-facing provider of streamlined IT services to end users. As such, IT as a service (ITaaS) has become a popular choice for closing the service gap between corporate IT and its more successful, public cloud counterparts.
With successful public cloud providers, customers access easy-to-use web portals with useful, self-service menus of available IT services. Corporate ITaaS has the same goal of creating self-service portals — complete with a menu of selectable, automated IT services. It sounds straightforward enough, but attempts at these types of ITaaS portals often end up falling flat. This slideshow shares five reasons why many self-service ITaaS portals just aren't working, as identified by Steve Nassif, senior manager of cloud service management, at Datalink.
About the author: Steve Nassif is Datalink's senior manager of cloud service management. He and his team work closely with midrange and enterprise companies to realize the benefits of cloud computing in their own environments.
