Standardization: Ensure your enterprise is implementing and supporting IT according to global standards.
Reuse: Stop reinventing the wheel! Minimize implementation time by ensuring your IT organization leverages solutions that other enterprises are successfully using, as well .
Consistency: Ensure repeatable solutions that can easily be used, over the long term.
Optimization: Hit the ground running with solutions that are tried and true, allowing you to avoid waste.
Quality: Ensure your IT solutions and stakeholders are as complate as possible.
Open and Sanctioned: Leverage solutions that come from a community of resources that goes well beyond the magnitude and capaticy of your own enterprise.
About the IF4IT...
The International Foundation for Information Technology (IF4IT) is an organization that provides highly commoditized, "open and sanctioned" solutions for Information Technology (IT) Operations that comply with conventional industry wisdom and that can be used in any enterprise.
Common Issues With IT Organizations...
- They often don't speak a common language among themselves, let alone speaking one that your business understands.
- They often implement solutions that already exist by starting from scratch, causing unnecessarily long implementation times.
- They often reinvent the wheel, causing your enterprise to have non-standard solutions that solve the same problems other enterprises are trying to solve but in a different and unnecessary manner.
- They don't share what they learn, making it difficult for others to want to share with them, in return.
- They often forget they exist to serve your business and not compete with it.
- They're never large enough, well enough equipped, or well funded enough to solve all our Business' problems, yet they seem to always want to try, themselves.
- They're almost always a large expense that any business wishes they didn't have to deal with.
Common Issues With the IT Industry...
- Commercial enterprises and their marketing organizations mutilate terminology, phrases and definitions to meet their own marketing needs, continuing to confuse businesses that desperately need IT standardization.
- Commercial enterprises treat IT as if it were a competitive advantage, rarely sharing what they know or learn about IT Operations so that others can benefit from their efforts.
- There are too many point solutions that try to solve specific problems in specific areas of IT Operations. The net result is ambiguity and conflict as each point solution inevitably "bleeds" into other areas of IT Operations.
Undesired Outcomes...
- Technologists, who get promoted into management and who went into technology for the love of technology and not management (their strong point being technology and not management), have nowhere to turn to learn about consistent and industry standard solutions, requiring them to make things up, as they go along, in order to be successful.
- IT Leaders all over the world continuously implement solutions that other IT Leaders have previously implemented, more often than not in a very different manner, resulting in reinvented wheels.
- Businesses that fund IT get stuck with the bill for this constant and highly unnecessary inefficiency.
IF4IT Goals...
- To provide a single, consistent, and unified knowledge source for all things related to Information Technology Operations so that IT Leaders and Resources can come to one place to share and learn about solutions that are considered to be conventional wisdom in the IT industry.
- To leverage an already large and constantly growing community of highly intelligent global IT resources, with the intent to create a set of, reusable, open and sanctioned solutions for IT operations which continue to expand and improve, through voluntary contribution.
- To apply the open source model of software development to "content" and other solutions that can be leveraged by enterprises, everywhere.
- To take the best ideas and solutions from many existing "point solutions" and roll them up into a larger, all-encompassing solution for IT Operations that fits our intended model.
- To offer solutions for free or as close to free as possible so that enterprises don't have to pay for what is normally considered to be conventional wisdom.
- To spread a consistent and rich education of Information Technology Operations.
The IF4IT Methodology...
- We've started by creating a powerful, highly consistent and extremely thorough baseline vocabulary that we've captured in a glossary of IT Operations terms and phrases. This vocabulary acts as a foundation that ensures everyone is speaking the same language when it comes to Information Technology Operations.
- We then document and publish constructs, content and tools that have evolved and developed from our baseline vocabulary. These solutions help us identify the many functional concepts that IT works with or assists its businesses with.
- We leverage the feedback and contributions of the IT community, with the intent to constantly improve and expand our solutions.
- Finally, and most importantly, we share what we learn, in an "open and sanctioned" manner so that everyone can use what we know to solve their enterprise's problems.
Our hope is that you find our solutions useful and valuable enough that you contribute to the cause!
