I want to join Glenn O'Donnell in introducing The Infrastructure Transformation Playbook. The entire I&O team has been working on research for this playbook in the last year, and we think it should be your starting point as you plan your infrastructure priorities for 2015.
 
Cloud and the digital business imperatives you face in 2015 are the external forces driving this transformation. What it means for your internal organization is now's the time to get serious about service design and service delivery. As Glenn, the research director guiding this playbook, says:
 
"Your future lies not in managing pockets of infrastructure, but in how you assemble the many options into the services your customers needs. Our profession has been locally brilliant, but globally stupid. We’re now helping you become globally brilliant. We call this service design, a much broader design philosophy rooted in systems thinking. The new approach packages technology into a finished “product” that is much more relevant and useful than any of the parts alone."
 
Your future technology infrastructure is hybrid, but for most of you the future's already here. This hybrid mix of on-premises and public IaaS and PaaS cloud platforms, converged infrastructure, cloud storage and software-defined networks demands more from technology managers — you must become service brokers and trusted partners to your customers. They rely on you to source and deploy the right mix of infrastructure services, and to guarantee capacity, performance and unparalleled speed wherever applications and workloads live.
 
Start with the Executive Overview to understand how Forrester can help you transform your infrastructure in 2015 and beyond.