Within a company whose size or core business requires an IT department, the question today is whether to continue to centralise all aspects of IT in this department, or to move towards greater flexibility. In short, should application access be decentralised in order to respond to market changes and the arrival of SaaS software? 

Information systems, centralised by habit?

Because it was simpler and more manageable to proceed in this way for several decades, corporate IT projects have until now been confined to a single block in most cases. The centralised architecture, which was originally an accumulation with no real negative impact, is now becoming a burden, as it takes over resources, the application base and user access. Faced with the vitality and evolution of digital practices, hybrid work and SaaS solutions, the bricks have been laid on top of each other, making the information system ever denser.

However, each business area, with its own technologies, should benefit from a personal unity, without working in silos, on the contrary. This is in order to keep up with the evolution of each business in order to remain competitive. Better still, technologies are now at the heart of corporate strategies. 

The IT department, at the heart of the transformation

As a study by IBM's Institute for Business Value (IBV) published at the end of 2021 shows, decentralisation does not mean less valuable work for CIOs. On the contrary, its results show that turnover increases in parallel with the integration of new adapted technologies. So much so that the position with the most critical responsibilities in the coming years, according to the CEOs, is that of Chief Technical Officer. This is twice as important as the marketing director or the HR managers. In other words, the CIO is no longer the support department only, but a fundamental link in the value chain.

Some CIOs may have already felt aggrieved by the decentralisation of decisions on the choice of technical solutions devolved to the digital transformation as a whole. Especially as business units are buying SaaS products exponentially.

However, the role of the IT department today lies at the borderline of data security, infrastructure and the evolution of the hybrid cloud to adapt to the new mobility of employees and customers. For this to happen, the IT department must also accept change management and open up to new expertise, particularly operational expertise, to accelerate the transition to a decentralised model. In addition, their extensive knowledge and analysis of the cloud puts them above the fray when it comes to the critical use of SaaS and the IaaS environment. And that goes for all businesses.

"The explosion of the SaaS mode means that if I had to control all these possibilities linked to SaaS, I would spend my life acting as a policeman and that's not at all what I want to do. > It's better to anticipate and control (align & organize while supporting)." Philippe de Guis, CIO at Adista

The benefits of IT decentralisation

The advantages of decentralising the information system appear over time and in the light of events. Who would have thought that a health crisis would require everything to be moved to the cloud overnight? So much so that agility, productivity and employee autonomy are among the main advantages of decentralisation designed for competitiveness and innovative product development.

Agility

Achieving agility at all levels of the company is a desire for many managers. It is clear that IT cannot get through. Without it, even the most brilliant ideas cannot reach scale if they have not been formalised by IT. Decentralisation means that there is no longer any question of finding a needle in a haystack and thus dismantling the whole thing, with all the risks that this entails for the system. Divided into as many small blocks as necessary, the risk only concerns the block in question. This has the effect of shortening the time to production without having to pause the production line for every problem that arises.

"It's much more agile to let people choose their tools: they know their job best. Under the cover of a general policy, so that everyone doesn't do anything. By knowing what is installed, I can check that we don't have 10 tools to do the same thing: it's a cost reduction and an economy of scale. Philippe de Guis, IT Director at Adista

Productivity 

The ease with which SaaS solutions can be integrated into business processes should not, however, sideline the IT department. Here again, its role lies in the same fluidity that enables productivity, while remaining a guardian and a provider of solutions for the automation of processes, the administration of developments and accesses, in other words, the governance of data as a whole.

"If I wanted to centralise, I would be caught in a trap: the business would ask me "I need a tool to do this", except that I don't know the specifications in detail (all the technical and functional requirements) and even less the responses of the publishers to meet this need: I would be caught in my own trap. Philippe de Guis, CIO at Adista

Autonomy

New recruits to the company have everything to gain from the decentralisation of IT. Their operational process is supervised in a small part and they can start their project immediately. Upstream and downstream of recruitment, the IT department retains its prerogatives for access and workstation management, which it can automate itself, and for overall administration. 

A necessary share of centralisation in ISDs 

The decentralisation of IT does not open the way to total freedom in the choice of solutions or the management of development. The IT department retains control over the integrity of the company's data and security and its IT infrastructure, as well as certain strategic areas, such as programming languages, software usage policy and the link with SaaS publishers. Hence the importance of measuring the scope of centralisation on a company-wide basis. 

Automation: a tool of the ISD

The IT department benefits directly from the possibilities offered by automation when it comes to managing users, as mentioned above. This also implies being able to limit time-consuming tasks within the deployment of hybrid work due to the ever-increasing number of incoming flows. Opening access (email, business applications), retrieving hardware (computer, badge, laptop), etc. There is no miracle solution to the problem of decentralisation, but the mapping of your ecosystem with the associated users remains essential for the company. The Pyla solution has been designed to offer an approach to resource management by user profile, with different associated administrators. Pyla helps you to organise the decentralisation of resource management between business, general services and IT.

The centralisation of IT is already ancient history, as SaaS solutions are now becoming the norm. However, the risks to the security and integrity of company information require full measure of the essential upstream control of the IT department, decentralised of course, but still with an overview.

‍