Understanding How Organizations Operate Their IT Capacity-Management Processes

There is a lack of understanding of how organizations operate their IT capacitymanagement processes. Within the body of literature on IT capacity-management there is an abundance of advice for organizations on how to set up or run the processes for IT capacitymanagement, but very little in the way of describing the processes as performed and operated in organizations out in the field. Using qualitative methods this research sought to gain an understanding of how organizations are operating their IT capacity-management processes in the field. A dozen subjects from 10 organizations were interviewed and the data were analyzed with a grounded theory approach. Cloud computing was found to be a disruptive technology providing the occasion for major changes in the structures of IT capacity-management. The differences in these structures were expressed through an IT capacity-management structures spectrum. The relative relationships between the roles in these structures as plotted along this spectrum were found to have the IT capacity-management role migrate from mediator, to directly linked to the data center, to largely absent. The results provide the IT capacity-management field and managers in IT a starting point from which to shape career development and organizational change management efforts as an organization migrates from a classic structure to a cloud