We also need to update our IT strategy to take into account our new corporate plan. Our new strategy needs to be cognisant of any technology advances or anything else on our 'landscape' that might have changed.
So, first up on the topic list is IT agility.
How can we cultivate IT agility? in other words, how can we respond quickly to customer demand without getting stuck in bureaucratic treacle? But, it's a bit more than that. How can we get ahead of the game and be a supportive and positive partner to our University? Our knowledge and expertise ought to put us in a great place to understand how technology can be leveraged to push us collectively forward. So, what's stopping us?
Well, I attended an interesting presentation by Paul Strong, Chief Technology Officer at VMWare. I also managed to speak to Paul for a bit after his Gartner presentation. While he didn't really address the whole IT agility question, he did address a small part - which mostly revolves around IT process automation. And, it did contain a call to action for central / enterprise IT - that's us by the way. For those of you who don't know - and appologies to those who do - we use VMWare technology to run most of our data centre.
Paul reckons we’ve got it a bit wrong for the last 30
years. Concentrating on infrastructure
and ‘spinning rust’* rather than ‘Innovation Technology’ – as he says IT should
really represent. (*IT infrastructure joke for spinning magnetic disk. No, it doesn't get any better in infrastructure land)
What does he mean by this? Organisations typically use
the application lifecycle – with an operational process framework to help. The framework we use, of course, is ITIL and Joe McIntyre and his team have put a lot of time into its adoption - with some of us getting certified to different levels.
ITIL is a common approach for operational management of
services and provides processes and we all have supporting tools such as a
service desk system - we use Supportworks. Almost everyone uses ITIL in some form. So far, so
good. But, ITIL and other frameworks obfuscate
and get in the way of agility. People in
these processes often act as gatekeepers – preventing change. Security specialists are often particularly
obstructive to speedy adoption of anything new.
Sorry guys - this isn't to say security and processes aren't necessary. Far from it. But..this is not necessarily the way to agility. As with everything, it's a balance Paul argues - we probably all agree.Paul suggests that organisations have too many applications and therefore complexity. This is the primary reason why IT has not brought the expected economies of scale and actually holds back innovation. It’s far too complicated. Cloud providers are much better at this. Why should this be the case? Cloud providers only provide a small number of architectural blueprints that they refine and run efficiently. With fewer blueprints, you can automate like crazy and economies of scale are possible. It’s all about simplification.
How do we get better at this? Standardise, standardise, standardise. Not a great mystery. The complexity is not about the number of
servers*; it’s the number of server variants.
*Insert any technology for server. This is one of the primary principles we use when looking at technical architectures at our IT Architecture Board. But, the emphasis on a limited number of simple technical choices perhaps needs to be greater. Compromise functionality to gain greater simplicity.
So, onto Virtualisation.
I won’t repeat all the standard Virtualisation stuff. But, and Paul didn’t talk about this, what
about the Virtualisation vendor? Should
we stick with VMWare or go to, the now number two, Microsoft. Gartner have a nice magic quadrant that
compares vendors over time. 
Paul asserts, like most others, that cloud is a new
consumption model for IT which is massively disruptive. People are and will be enticed by the
consumption model – the experience of buying commodity and relatively cost
effective IT infrastructure and SaaS*. If central IT don’t get on board then
business units and everyone else will go straight to cloud providers. The central IT barrier, whether it’s security
or some other obstacle will be moved around.
So, this is a challenge that central IT teams need to respond to. Remember, that's us. (*Software as a Service)
Paul’s general recommendation is to automate simple architectures like there's no tomorrow – this is the great opportunity. The natural trend will be to push via automation to cloud services from and to on premise services - in other words, hybrid cloud. This is where VMWare is positioned (amongst a few others), to provide a single control point – for the hybrid cloud. Once, organisations do this then operational cost will reduce freeing up budget and providing time for innovation.
We need to watch out for disruptive change like this. Remember Encyclopaedia Britannica? $600m revenue
in 1990. Down to $195m revenue in 1995. Now, they are effectively gone. Obviously, Wikipedia pretty much now own this space.
So, central IT – we don’t want to be another Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
The impact of IT on the consumer, business and our culture has
been huge in the last few years.
Amazon is a good example of a company who have radically
disrupted at least two business areas.
Books and supply chain have been transformed – eliminating value chain
intermediaries, introducing a new monetization model, driving customer
preference in an existing market. Media distribution companies have been
effectively destroyed by Amazon. Paul agrues that the same
thing is happening in cloud, again driven by Amazon and AWS. Perhaps,
looking back in five years – we will only really understand how disruptive
cloud has been. It is worth noting that not everyone agrees with Paul.
So, Central / Enterprise IT, the challenge is to engage
positively and work with SaaS and the cloud to provide value and this means
challenging why we run basic server and storage infrastructure ourselves.
