Q&A With Logicalis' Mike Alley: ITSM Is Not Just For IT Anymore

What about organizations where IT – maybe the CIO – is not seen as a strategic player? How do you sell them on this?

You do that to sell them on a vision of what "strategic player" means. A couple of years ago, I looked at a CIO survey that [said] 25 percent of CIOs said they really were a business partner, 50 percent of them said they were a cost center, and 25 percent said they had been sidelined by the business. They're sidelined by the business or they're viewed as cost centers because they're not moving fast enough and responsively enough or creatively enough to drive the motion that the business requires to stay competitive. And if that is the case, [businesses are] going out looking for their own solutions from SaaS providers, from thought providers, whomever. That’s not a bad thing; there's a lot of them out there. But they're doing it outside of the normal governance that you have in IT. And at the end of the day, they wind up – I can't say this is what caused that – with a partner in there that puts prime information on cloud storage and sets the settings wrong and [the provider] loses a million customers' information.