How many strategies does your IT have?

A lot of money is wasted in the enterprise through poor communication, through the detachment of the infrastructure teams, the evolution teams and the business/end users. That the evolution teams, the guys that work out what operating systems, what servers, what tools to use, might make a decision which causes disruption or has the opposite effect of the original intention.

I’ll give you an example, I was speaking to Mike the other week, he’s working for one of the British banks, and he’s been handling their Windows XP roll out. One of the problems he has is that the bank has many branches in the UK, the pc is there, but if the pc doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world, the main work is provided by their citrix/thin client solutions, with that in mind, they operate on a three year or so replacement strategy. As a result the rules for desktops are set with a retail bank mind set, a Pentium 4 with 256mb ram and a 10gb hard drive is the ‘minimum’ supported spec.

The problem is, the business units in the investment bank subsidiary sometimes use these ‘rules’, these guidelines to control their costs, that a document somewhere says a Pentium 4 is suitable to run XP, means that he sometimes gets requests to rebuild a pc which is nearing it’s end of life in an effort to avoid the £150 cost of purchasing a new pc, to keep it going that bit longer. You can completely understand this, in the branch with three people, where the pc is used once or twice a day, but not so much in London, where it’s the centre of the users’ day, their universe.

With that in mind in the banking sector, in the enterprise shouldn’t there be two strategies? Ideally you’d have one, the high availability, user focused solution where money is secondary to the delivery (not wasting money, just continually investing and evolving the IT for your business). However, I suspect this is more a want than something that will happen. So back to my original point, can I have two strategies please, for my two different business lines.

I’ll have one for the retail bank, a locked down robust windows platform where changes to the windows platform are managed, controlled and where the hardware standards change infrequently. I’ll also have the investment bank equivalent, where your pc, your server is (either virtual) or depreciated over a maximum of three years, where at the end of it, you either buy a new box or as the box ages, your support costs rise, where there is no incentive to keep a computer over the long term. That way I avoid the following:

• Windows migration projects - they are expensive and disruptive, not to mention quite emotional - but why should I buy a new box? My NT4 box runs fine
• Conversations about upgrades - the memory costs how much - my box would typically be nearing replacement by the time it needed upgraded
• Make the server a commodity - it’s a component of the infrastructure - not the center of my existence -but I need my Compaq…
• My application code needs to continually evolve - avoiding those hard coded hostname/ip addresses in the application code
• Avoid security compliance issues - again the box gets rebuilt/replaced every 3 years, at which point we can fix/evolve security with the new server
• Avoid the asset problems - as the name changes, as the box swaps hands - “LONS19872? that’s an transversal system, not mine..”
• Being stuck on set hardware/infrastructure - that application which is only validated to run on Dec Alpha kit on VMS version…. sigh…

Interestingly virtualization might resolve some of these key issues, as I abstract the operating system from the hardware, and as we reach the point where for example the application can run on just an ESX instance without Linux or Windows, this will be even more the case.

In the meantime, can I have multiple strategies please, all with a focus on delivery, common sense, long term cost avoidance and consistency in user experience.