How infrastructure and operations teams can remove friction

As organisations experience friction between teams, the infrastructure and operations department can remove this through understanding what the business does and now they can serve the organisation better.

At the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Strategies conference Padraig Byrne, research director at Gartner's IT Systems, Security and Risk research group explained how businesses can remove friction within their teams.

According to Gartner research, 47 percent of employees experience high digital friction on a regular basis.

Byrne said nearly half of an organisation’s staff are most likely to be suffering the slow, unwieldy systems, bureaucratic IT processes or simply issues with their laptops.

“The fact is that we are preventing them from delivering their full potential. But it's not always about the technology. Don't forget that the work we do has a real impact on business,” he said.

Infrastructure and operations teams can remove the friction by immersing themselves in the organisation.

“We can provide guidance and support while we both build on our capabilities. We can provide platforms and a common architecture to strengthen that partnership. Companies that succeed in digital business are rethinking the way they operate,” Byrne explained.

To remove that friction, certain questions need to be addressed.

Byrne said, “If we're going to remove the friction then we need to find out what they do and how it serves them. What can we do better? Is the service desk a black hole? Does the notice of major changes give them palpitations?

“I guarantee you will learn so much about how IT is perceived, how we can help and perhaps more importantly, how we hinder them.”

Byrne said if there is no immersion within teams, more friction is created.

Fusion teams

To help remove the friction, Byrne explained some organisations are using “fusion teams”.

“Business technologists are teaming up with their IT counterparts and they're using the product model to create fusion teams,” he said.

“These are multi-discipline digital teams that combine business and technology expertise with shared accountability for outcomes. They are critical for the digital success as they extend the capacity and the bandwidth of it. They deliver business outcomes faster with less bureaucracy and friction,” he said.

Byrne said digital business is now a team sport with Gartner data showing 84 percent of organisations have distributed and multidisciplinary digital business teams, known as fusion teams.

“Fusion team benefits are significant, we have found that organisations that operate with more distributed and simultaneous initiatives deliver 2.5 times faster, than organisations that run in a typical IT team,” he explained.

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