Enterprise IT has witnessed a series of changes over the past decades from mainframe to personal computing, and from scaling out dozens of IT systems to hundreds and thousands. However, with the current rapid move towards cloud services, the impact of changes on enterprise IT has never been more profound. IT has always had the traditional role of providing (developing and operating) and supporting IT systems and services for the enterprise. This role is now rapidly evolving towards becoming a broker of IT services, and integrator and manager of a hybrid portfolio of IT services that includes internally developed and externally acquired services. This new role brings up a set of challenges to enterprise IT. Much of IT service innovation and advances in cloud services have mainly focused on the service provider side with the aim of providing scalable platforms, scalable delivery and business models, operations and support, etc. Not much attention has been given to the challenges at the service consumer side (here enterprise IT) for designing, acquiring, operating and managing a diverse portfolio of services, often consisting of legacy in-house IT systems, and internal and external services, which we refer to as a hybrid service portfolio. In this article, we first discuss the trends and the changes that cloud services bring to enterprise IT highlighting the fact that the role of enterprise IT is fundamentally shifting from a provider of IT services to a broker and manager of hybrid IT service portfolios. We discuss challenges and present a framework for a novel technology solution supporting the service consumer role of IT.
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