Why Your Self-Service ITaaS Portal Isn’t Working

Featured article by By Steve Nassif, Datalink

Many IT organizations are now exploring or actively moving to a cloud-centric paradigm. They are also attempting to transform their role from a components supplier to that of a service provider. This is the nature of the related idea known as IT as a Service (ITaaS). As a service provider, Corporate IT teams may now have to deal with the prospect that they may even be competing with public cloud providers for the right to service end users’ specific IT needs.

Returning to the NIST definition of cloud computing, a key characteristic of cloud is the ability to provide “on-demand self-service.” This involves the automatic provisioning of computing resources without the need for “human interaction” with the service provider. In the case of successful public cloud providers of ITaaS, this translates into customers going to custom web portals with an automated, selectable catalog of IT services to choose from. Known as self-service ITaaS portals, Corporate IT teams are now trying to create and/or duplicate such successful front-ends for their own slate of IT services.

Are they doing as well as their successful public cloud colleagues? Not always. In our work with midrange and enterprise companies, we’ve learned a few things about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to self-service ITaaS portals. Here, I’ll share a few ways IT teams tend go wrong with their own end-user portals.

Not Knowing Your Customer

Many IT teams see ITaaS portals as a way to first automate their own administrative functions. They also tend to target one type of user (for instance, application developers) over their larger audience of users. Aiming your ITaaS portal at the wrong consumer community is the first pitfall. Instead of looking at what 10% of your users need, make sure you focus first on the remaining 90%.

Offering Services Your Customers Don’t Want

The focus of an IT team might be aimed correctly at the right end users, but a portal may still fall flat if it doesn’t offer a relevant catalog of services that appeals to those users. One focus that’s often lacking in portal design is the early work asking users where they really need help. A useful question to ask? “What can IT do to help revenue-generating business units support their bottom line?”

Instead of offering new VMs or a certain amount of storage, your ITaaS portal may want to offer solutions to key problems or use cases your users are trying to solve. Starting from what solutions users are seeking is a good lesson that can also be applied to self-service ITaaS portals.

Making Things Too Hard

Even when IT organizations have identified the right community and the right catalog of services, they will still often fail at user interface design of the portal. Self-service portals need to be simple and intuitive for users to navigate, otherwise they won’t want to bother. It takes planning and sorting through a good amount of complexity in order to make things simple. In some ways, poor interface design is another good reason why Shadow IT exists. Consumers are swiping their own credit cards and selecting public cloud not just because it’s cheaper, but because it’s easy.

Where’s the ROI?

Helping end users do things in a fraction of the time it used to take them is worth something to your company. Measuring these types of benefits and other key performance indicators (KPI) can be tough when it comes to evaluating the success of your ITaaS portal. It has to do with users’ subjective experiences as well. In the early phases of a portal project, spend time determining how to measure the project’s ultimate success. If you get it right, budget for future projects may be a lot easier to get approved. If you get it wrong, the time and money spent on the portal may just sink into another IT black hole.

Not Starting Small Enough

Anytime IT is trying out a new way of doing things, it can make sense to pilot the idea first in a smaller rollout. Enlist the help of key business unit stakeholders as the first consumers of your portal services. Create a feedback loop that makes the early ITaaS portal better. Don’t publicize the project until you think it’s ready for a wider audience. Then, let your early users help market the usefulness of the portal to the rest of your users.

Are you making any of these mistakes in your own efforts toward self-service ITaaS portals? By avoiding these types of pitfalls and learning first what your customers really need, you’ll go a long way toward boosting your own portal’s chance of success.

About the author: Steve Nassif is Datalink’s senior manager of cloud service management. He and his team work closely with midrange and enterprise companies to realize the benefits of cloud computing in their own environments.