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It’s time for IT departments to break with tradition, says Vernon Turner, Group Vice-President and General Manager, Enterprise Computing, at Framingham, Mass.-based International Data Corp. (IDC).

Turner believes that IT professionals must learn to think about the effect of IT on business. “The CIO needs to get IT away from thinking just pure plumbing to thinking about business outcomes,” he says. “What’s the effect of making this change to our infrastructure? What is the effect of bringing in new technology? Can it be flexible? Can it be dynamic? Will it be a well-used asset?”

It’s a new era of “IT business-speak”, says Turner, in which closing the gap between IT and business is a necessity. Rather than measuring stats such as server utilisation or availability, IT needs to relate business outcomes directly to IT service delivery.

“It’s about pushing the capabilities inside the box… and making that move into the next phase of developing competitive advantage,” Turner says.

Recognising the challenges CIOs face as they try to break with IT tradition, Turner offers three key strategies. 

The first is to close what IDC calls the innovation gap. According to IDC figures, by 2010, every dollar spent on hardware will take another $5 for systems management, power and cooling, and business continuity. * Meanwhile, IT budgets continue to run at or near the rate of inflation.

Turner notes that some companies spend almost 90 percent of IT budgets on expenses, leaving very little room for innovation. “It’s not just about installing hardware; you really have to be able to get your hands around the systems management piece.”

The second strategy is to shift from pure asset management to service-level management. While today’s CIOs are comfortable talking about software as a service and service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts at the application layer, they have to apply that same thinking to IT infrastructure. “In some cases it could be the number of trades completed per second, or it could be dollars per square foot of retail space,” Turner says. “You need to turn those metrics into services delivered by IT.”

Turner’s final piece of advice is to start automating IT processes that now require manual input. “Lean IT” includes increasing platform utilisation, adding capacity on the fly as needed, and managing as seamlessly as possible.

“CIOs need to sit back and say ‘How do we deliver this? Where do we start to think about IT efficiencies?’” says Turner. “And that means looking at companies like HP and asking ‘How do you provide me with these capabilities?’”

HP helps organisations tie IT benefits to business outcomes by building environments that reduce costs, mitigate risks and enable growth, while providing high-performance, high-availability and virtualisation capabilities.

“The most important aspect that HP brings to this vision is that you need to have modularity and you need to have management capability across multiple domains,” says Turner. “In other words, IT needs a storage blade, a server blade, maybe even a network or security capability, all wrapped into the lowest form of modularity without compromise. What we want to do is allow customers to buy as they really need, based on the application and based on the business requirement.”

CIOs know the technology is there. The challenge is implementing it in a way that breaks the “nasty chain” of the innovation gap. “First of all you have to get away from how you manage your organisation today,” says Turner. “And then you have to break down those organisational stovepipes in order to make this happen.”

*2007, Vernon Turner, Directions, “CIO Strategies for the next generation data center.”