Shell Company's IT4IT Reference Architecture Adoption: A Case Study Essay.

Activity A: Case study
Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3
Need to answer each and every question
There is video link in the file which is case study and need to answer all these question
NOTE : group assignment so need to follow the same language for group assignment for two people Link for the case study.

This assignment partially addresses three of the learning objectives of the course:
LO1: integrate the fundamentals of business process management with service management in reference to the value IT can deliver to the enterprise
LO2: identify the importance of IT governance and service management and the need for organisations to ensure that effective processes are in place to manage the significant investment in IT infrastructure and services.
LO3: synthesise the nature and contribution of the IT service management standards and good practice frameworks such as IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), ISO/IEC 20000 and IT4IT™ in providing good practice frameworks for IT service manag

Challenges Faced by Shell

Part 1: Introduction

The IT4IT References Architecture is an Open Group Standard and has been designed in order to assist IT managers as well as CIOs for managing the business of IT in multi-supplier environment. One of the adopters of the reference framework is oil industry organization Royal Dutch Shell. Shell Company has worked by making coordination with The Open Group in order to share expertise as well as jointly design integrated mode in the purpose of managing business of IT. Present report deals with the gaps in IT service management in Shell Company before adopting IT4IT and the reasons of adoption. The results for adoption are provided with suitable justification.

Shell faces several challenges in matching their IT capabilities in order to compete and fulfill the requirements of business as well as minimizing IT spend at the time of delivering information technology solutions faster (Josey, 2015, p.54). There are also several tends such as cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), big data and mobile, which becomes vital factors to changing business and play an important role to connect with the customers. These also enable business models for changing environment. On the other hand, these trends of technology like cloud and big data provide value to business whether these technologies can be appropriately implemented and managed.

However, one of the major challenges faced by the organization is requirement of everything at the same time. The company needs minimizing costs of information technology in the organization significantly at the time of fulfilling increasing demands of the business at faster speed (Maeset al. 2016, p.229). It is also leveraging capabilities of making capable of digital information technology. It helps to enable new models for business. Like other larger organizations, Shell has a number of disruptive IT technologies as well as changes in ecosystem that can be detected through affecting the existed management capabilities of information technology like mobile, big data, IT consumerization and API economy.

Before adopting IT4IT at Shell, the company faced a number of complexities and the volume of IT activities that increases significantly (The Open Group, 2017). The gaps or complexity can be described as followed.

• Escalating the number of devices that are connected to the network of the organization
• Increasing the volumes of improvement and changes as well as releases for continuous delivery (Gillet al.2016, p.120)
• Increasing risks in security and the requirements to act in preferred way
• Developing the rate of consumption and use of information technology based resources
• Increasing the number of external service providers

The gaps and complexity found in the existed system enable to adopt a new system that can fulfill the changing demands required in the organization. The trends as well as movements make a combination of the results needed in changing IT ecosystem in which the organization must be more responsive, agile as well as cost-effective for service broker (Osorio, 2016, p.114). It has been realized to Shell that the organization needs to be more agile and implement the fast changing eco system. Along with these, the trends generally observed to rise with the demands in more consolidated way. Sabokrou, Fayyaz and Fathy (2016, p.241) stated that automated information technology management capabilities are referred as IT for IT. The new model of IT operating is required for managing IT reality.

IT4IT Reference Framework Adoption

Because having lack in application standard in the present market, the organization has developed architecture for own IT management as well as blueprint in order to enhance and make standardization of IT functions. The particular blue print includes common process model and IT data model as well as IT management tool architecture. The best quality practices like ITIL, SCRUM, PMBOK and COBIK made a combination of providing standard delivery model of the process of operating IT in the organization (Greve, 2016, p.118). However, implementation of the specified tools requires to support the IT operating model need major customization and effort for maintenance. During the large outsourcing, Shell has developed own interfaces in order to collaborate and make integration of the providers for exchanging incidents, consumption and costs of IT. However, there was still lot of efforts engaged in designing, configuring and maintaining tools for IT management. In this perspective, Shell has made a decision to change their approach and decide to adopt IT4IT Reference framework.

Adopting IT4IT standard at Shell provides essential guidelines of the process of implementing the new operating model in order to enable new paradigms for IT management like DevOps, Lean as well as agile development, significantly automation of It activities like automated development, test, monitoring, deploying and automated recovery. In addition, it helps to guide continuous integration along with delivery. Adoption of IT4IT Reference Framework gives a value to the organization (Sun, 2016, p.300). It explains the process of managing functions in order to optimize value of IT for business. IT4IT Reference Architecture helps the organization to be capable of more streamlined and transparent as well as automated the function of information technology across entire IT value chain. It assists Shell to make transition to lead as well as agile the service broker. Adoption of the framework results in increasing the number of use of the cloud solutions such as Software as a Service in Shell. Increasing the volume of changes and releases issue is solved with the help of reference framework (Lukicet al. 2016, p.98). In addition, there are number of outcomes for adopting the reference framework at Shell such as developing strategy to portfolio. It makes integrated solution as well as project portfolio management and Enterprise Architecture system. It also helps to set up a governance model in order to manage capabilities from a procedure, data as well as tooling perspective.

Mimouna (2013, p.254) mentioned that adoption of IT4IT Reference Architecture provides a number of advantages through which it can be justified. It ensures sponsorship of IT executive to manage information technology in the organization. Adoption can be helpful to give architectural guidance for developing capabilities of IT management through assigning enterprise-wide IT4IT architect.  In addition, the justification of adopting IT4IT can be explained as followed.

• It increases the value of information technology investments for business.
• Adoption of the reference architecture enables to respond as well as deliver requirements of business faster (Jiaet al.2015, p.85).
• It minimizes cost of IT through automating the activities of information technology.
• IT4IT Reference framework also helps the company to minimize risks involved with IT (Singh & Kaur, 2016, p.19).
• In addition, adoption of the framework enhances the transparency along with traceability that supports continuous enhancement in the organization.

Conclusions

From the above discussions, it can be concluded that adoption of IT4IT Reference Framework set a governance model for the organization. The Open Group IT4IT is used as blueprint in order to analyze the present state and evaluate the opportunities to enhance and make an agreement on target state. The gaps existed before adopting the framework is escalated through adoption of the framework. In addition, number of advantages provided by the reference framework help to develop a community with the IT functions in order to define the practices of standard and involve with IT specialists to capture the feedback for enhancement of IT management capabilities.

References

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Singh, R. & Kaur, P.J., 2016. Analyzing performance of Apache Tez and MapReduce with hadoopmultinode cluster on Amazon cloud. Journal of Big Data, vol.3, no.1, p.19.

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The Open Group 2017. Case Studies and Testimonials | The Open Group, viewed 26 March 2017, <https://www.opengroup.org/IT4IT/testimonials>