A different mind-set

"End-to-end optimization requires a real organizational change," says Tony Bishop, former chief architect at Wachovia, and now CEO of IT consultancy Adaptivity. If IT is to become a utility, it must be able to deliver its services without being caught up in internal turf wars and finger-pointing. Now, more than ever, IT must reorganize, he says.

"People need to become accountable as part of a value chain, instead of being accountable for a specific function," Bishop says. "It's not the server; it's a component of a value chain of delivering services. And that's a different mind-set," he says.

Others agree, saying the best way to ensure optimal application performance end to end is to group the IT department into two units: application delivery and application support.

"We're starting to organize that way," network engineer Morris says. "We still have infrastructure and applications, but we now have infrastructure operations and infrastructure delivery within the infrastructure team. And the delivery teams are aligned with the application teams," he says.

For example, if the sales application team wants a new application, it has its own sales infrastructure team that handles server and network provisioning, and so on. "So, we've seen some alignment," Morris says. "We call them build-teams, but essentially, they align with the business applications. They understand the business objectives and say, 'OK, these are the new applications coming in the business unit, these are the servers, network and all the hardware we're going to need to make that application work,'" he says.