Business Service vs. Product Thinking

By Myles Suer, #CIOChat Facilitator, CIO.com Contributor, and Dell Boomi Head of Global Enterprise Marketing

Many years ago, I was asked to review an early draft of ITIL Version 3.0. I remember even taking the draft service strategy book on vacation with me. My wife asked me at one point why I was getting so excited about a ‘tech manual’ while she said that she was reading something truly exciting, a romance novel. In the end, I made many comments and suggestions as a business strategist. Most did not get accepted.

EA and Agile – Not Mutually Exclusive After All!

Every organization needs to be Agile in order to handle all kind of forces and developments inside and outside the organization. Equally, organizations also need the structure and overarching view of an organization that is provided by Enterprise Architecture. and in particular, The TOGAF® standard, a standard of The Open Group. Both Lean and EA can make organizations more Agile, but work from a different, complementary perspective. By synergizing both EA and Lean knowledge, techniques, and people, many organizations are exploiting the strengths of both approaches.

The IT4IT™ Standard Brought to Life

At The Open Group Amsterdam 2019, participants were offered the chance to participate in an exciting new gamification of IT4IT™, a standard of The Open Group. Jan Schilt, co-owner of GamingWorks BV acted as the CEO role of a Banking concern named UBanQ. In that game role, Jan challenged several teams to prove that they could become the bank of choice for customers in a highly competitive, rapidly changing digital world.

The Interesting Case of Who’s Using the IT4IT™ Standard – Part Two – The Oil and Gas, IT, Retail, Logistics, and Engineering Sectors

The Open Group IT4IT™ Reference Architecture, a standard of The Open Group uses a value chain framework that applies this concept to IT by defining an integrated IT management framework focusing on the lifecycle of services. This allows IT to achieve the same level of business predictability and efficiency that supply chain management has allowed for the business.

The Interesting Case of Who’s Using the IT4IT™ Standard – Part One – The Banking and Insurance Sectors

The Open Group IT4IT™ Reference Architecture, a standard of The Open Group, is a value chain-based standard reference and operating model for managing the business of IT. It creates a model of the functions that IT performs to help organizations identify the activities that contribute to business competitiveness.

It supports real-world use-cases driven by the Digital Economy such as, Cloud-sourcing, Agile, DevOps, and service brokering, and is designed for existing landscapes, and accommodates future IT paradigms, making it ideal for Digital Transformation projects.

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