CC&C Solutions is an IT consulting firm focused on enterprise architecture and IT capability. Their mission is to help organizations and the IT industry. Michael Fulton presented on using ServiceNow to run the business of IT based on the IT4IT reference architecture. IT4IT provides a vendor-neutral framework for managing the entire IT value chain from strategy to operations. It addresses issues like lack of integration and insight. Originally developed by a consortium including Shell and HP, IT4IT is now supported by many large companies, vendors and consultants.
We are the tip of the spear, we help create your IT Transformation Strategies and Plans. We are strategists and architects, not implementers.
The IT Value is a prescriptive architecture for operating IT.
A value chain strategy delivers a competitive advantage as the result of streamlining the service lifecycle from concept to reality.
From an IT viewpoint this means,
Strategy to Portfolio is about making the right investments
Requirement to Deploy is about creating and deploying quality services
Request to Fulfillment is so IT has a catalog for service consumption to happen
Detect to Correct is keeping it operating
Now we can talk about the technology components that are involved in the production and consumption of these artifacts. Most IT people and technology providers will want to talk about products mapped to process. What we’ve seen those discussions lead to is the problem we have today in IT – an over-abundance of tools, a lot of shelf-ware, complex point-to-point integrations, and a glut of information that is difficult to get to and even harder to understand.
Our approach here is different – we are focused on the functional components, the solutions building blocks of the ecosystem. We can ultimately map this to products. But before we go there, it is important to get our arms around the functions within each value stream and their relationship to the production and consumption of the key artifacts.
The context for functional components starts with “capability”. A capability is a function or activity that can produce an outcome of value through people, process, and technology. ITIL defines a set of capabilities structured into a specific set of disciplines such as Incident Management, Event Management, etc.
The technology aspect of a capability is one of several functional components. The functional components become the “building blocks” for IT.
A functional component is the smallest technology unit that can stand on its own and be useful as a whole to a customer.
Our “big rules” for functional components are that they
must have defined inputs and outputs that are artifacts
have impact on a key artifact (for example, a state change).
Typically, functional components control a single artifact.
I’d like to point out here that this is not a product overview or roadmap discussion.
Some functional components may have a 1:1 relationship with products. For others, a single product can cover N number of functional components. I’ll show some example relationships between these functional components and our products. The benefits of defining the RA through Functional Components is that the FC definition will stay constant and is agnostic to the specific product choices made.
Let’s look at the functional components for each value stream in more detail.
AzkoNobel
Barclays
Disney
ING
Landsforsakringar
Morrisons PLC
NBC
Nestle
Paychex
Proctor & Gamble
Rabbobank
Raiffeisen Informatik