Consumer technology and cloud computing are revolutionizing IT. People expect their workplace IT experience to be the same as at home — as easy as
e-commerce shopping, searching the Web, and checking online email. Project teams want the same ease-of-use, speed, and cost from their internal data center operations as they can get from public cloud providers. To respond to this changing landscape, analysts and experts agree that IT departments must embrace a self-service IT model.
The consumerization of IT is one of the most significant forces affecting enterprise IT today. As consumers, your employees' expectations are being shaped by their experience with the Apple store, Yahoo, or Dell.com. They bring these expectations to the office, and they are often frustrated by their own IT department. The unfortunate perception is that the office has become a technological backwoods trapped in the past.
As a result, online business-to-consumer and retail e-commerce technology is forcing a paradigm shift in enterprise IT. Today's enterprise users demand a modern self-service experience for IT in the workplace — and the same shift is taking place for the infrastructure services provided by corporate data centers. In fact, with Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), one of the dominant online retailers is a pioneer in driving this same retail e-commerce model with cloud computing for data center services.
Self-service IT is the first step in meeting this challenge. Self-service is the key ingredient for cloud computing, and Amazon has redefined the expectations and pricing for data center services with this approach. IT departments can apply this model internally, by defining their own standard service options, introducing self-service, providing visibility into pricing, and deploying their own on-premise private or hybrid cloud.
To quote Michael Dell, corporate IT shops — and the managed service providers that serve the enterprise — need to make it "wicked easy for the consumer of IT to consume". Moreover, to overcome the old school perception of enterprise IT, they need an online IT Service Catalog. The catalog can be the modern Web-based brochure of what IT does, the menu of prices and options, the shopping cart for self-service ordering, the users' portal for status and billing, and the entry point for orchestrating automation.
newScale's Service Catalog software solutions make it as easy to order IT services as it is to buy a book on Amazon.com, configure a laptop on Dell.com, or spin up a cloud instance on EC2. By establishing standardized and repeatable services — and then publishing them in a self-service portal for IT consumers — the IT organization can provide a consistent way for users to request IT services, track the fulfillment for any request, manage the service lifecycle, and present a bill of services.
This catalog becomes the new face of IT to your application developers and project teams — delivering an experience for technical services similar to that offered by public cloud providers, yet with enterprise-class policies, controls, security, and governance. It also becomes the mechanism for business customers to see the cost and value that IT delivers, as well as the online self-service portal for end users to request workplace services and track their service subscriptions.
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Whether for workplace or data center services, a newScale Service Catalog can be your "one stop shop" self-service IT storefront — across cloud, virtual, or physical computing environments. You can apply the retail e-commerce model that your users are familiar with as consumers. When it comes to user adoption, you can apply the best practices of companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Dell. The key is to implement what we at newScale call "YADU": Yahoo-like search and categorization; Amazon-like merchandising; Dell-like configuration; and UPS-like tracking for services.
With a newScale Service Catalog, your IT organization can apply the YADU approach to ensure adoption and improve user satisfaction with a retail e-commerce model for your IT storefront. IT's internal customers and users will intuitively understand how to navigate and use your catalog because it's designed with a familiar self-service model that they use every day as consumers. In short, you can make it wicked easy for the consumers of IT to consume.
For more details on newScale self-service solutions, please go to our Literature Request Section to read the newScale RequestCenter Data Sheet.
