One of my friends who works for one of the banks was having a chat with me, he was telling me about work, what was going well with their virtualization project, what wasn’t, what the key issues technical and non-technical, it was very interesting. Over dinner he then asked me  what I thought about these kind of projects, where I thought IT got it wrong and it resulted in a very interesting conversation, the following comments/post you might say result from his question, “So in an ideal world, what is it you want?”

I want an IT that delivers. That goes the extra mile, that invests not because it has to but because it wants to add value to be the best. I want a desktop service where I can log into any pc, laptop, Wyse terminal in any location and have everything just work without a guy having to do something.

I want an IT where I can request a server and get it the same day, where the server is configured to my application with the right level of access permissions configured, which is all tracked from an asset/support level so that everyone knows what’s going on.

I want to be able to access the monitoring system to see how my application is doing, how the IT infrastructure is performing all online, I want my blackberry to give me an overview of what’s going on, to know what issues I’ve had overnight before I get to the office, to have an IT infrastructure that’s independent of the data center, that I can fail systems over to another office if the performance isn’t good enough, or if my NYC branch goes down to have it run from London.

I want an IT infrastructure where I can seamlessly request new storage or provision new systems by logging a call and get it that day - where I’m not asked questions about the type of storage, or which machine will run my virtual server.

I want a grid infrastructure that scales up and down on demand; that when my analytics batch kicks off, individual tasks can be sent to other application servers or desktops automatically, with resilience and on demand capacity in it’s true form, to avoid my batch running late at the end of the month due to volume of deals.

I want IT to “own the infrastructure”, to be testing the latest firmware or drivers to be saying to me, “HP have released 15/09/2004 firmware for the DL580G2’s, we’ve tested it and need to upgrade these servers..”, to have an asset overview, to know what systems are allocated to which business lines and are located in which data centers - a world where I as a business sponsor or an IT person can say “I want to know how many DL580G2’s we have, and what operating systems they run and who owns them” without waiting.

I want IT to have follow the sun support, that Mike doesn’t get called at 3am to reboot a server because Charlie is already on site, has the right level of access, can raise a break fix change and fully support the servers. That we work with the time zones not react to them - “Mike can you apply service pack 2 to the following systems after 10pm - 2pm your time?”

Most of all I want an IT team that understands the applications, that knows what effect “ping not responding on gaps983747″ will have on the derivatives team and can help resolve it or work our way around it, where they understand the application, the business criticality, what it means for the server to be down from a user perception, from an application performance and an infrastructure level.

But at the same time:

I want an engaged business team, one that understands you need to spend money to make (or save) money, that wants to continually evolve the application and the platform to get the best performance or functionality/reliability as well as to control our costs.

I want everything as much as possible abstracted from the platform through Web, through Citrix, where the client is just that client, where the application code has no specific requirements other than Windows or Java runtime, where the application can be moved from system to system or region to region. I want a lot of things, whether IT can do all of this, elements or components of this will depend on your business, how you achieve it will be dependent on your business, your constraints, be those technical or non-technical.
Any views?