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Why IT sometimes doesn’t help itself 

I was speaking with a manager who’d recently been talking with one the application teams about Grid. The business line want an extra 200 blades for their DataSynapse infrastructure, and the application team were wanting to buy the service in. The usual concern of cost and IT’s ability to deliver being raised. It’s raises a few issues which I’ve raised below. The conversation is being typed up and will be posted in the next few days. 

The IT is starting to underpin your business. That grid solution could be the difference between profit and loss, extra capacity, means faster/more accurate reports, which means traders can make more informed decisions, more profit. That web portal that connects all the front office tools for your customers, the ability to add more capacity on demand to meet that particular deal, to cope with new regions might not only be your point of contact with your customer, your brand but could be their vehicle for trading. It’s availability therefore is a key isssue.

With that in mind, as the business want more on demand, more capacity, the outsource model is beginning to look more interesting. In the olden days IT would provide everything, you’d turn up to the IT bods, ask for a new Compaq, they’d say four weeks, you’d say “can we have it sooner?”, “maybe three, we’ll see”. Increasingly though with blade technology solutions, with grid in particular, the turn around time can be achieved more quickly. The concept that if IT can’t do it, I’ll buy the bits in that I need. I’ll buy the data center, the blades, hand the components to the IT, and say “fix it.”.

This causes two problems for IT. First of all, there are chances that the business might buy something they might not necessarily agree with. “Dell blades? We only buy HP!”. Secondly, this makes IT increasingly less of the decision maker, the box provider and more a service provider. We’ve commoditized the IT department.

I’ll buy your application support, and the infrastructure stuff (DNS/WINS/network/Storage), but the boxes and the data center I can buy direct and have you manage it.  The process can be a partnership in every sense, “What do you think of this deal?”, But it requires a different mind set, the concerns over ownership and budget are very real, by buying in the data center, do I need data center staff?  Yes. You still need someone to understand what’s going where, what we can get away with and what the provider is prepared to allow. What we’ll find I suspect is that the IT changes from a department that used to do everything to one of an infrastructure provider, a mini consultancy.

They’ll provide the common services, the file and print, the storage, the backups. I’ll have them do my build evolution (providing it meets my business needs/timescales), maybe even the server builds. They can do the analysis of my interests, but the difference is, I’ll select the components I need for my business line that I need, and internalize the bits I need. My application support team might comprise of the application support guy, a windows guy a unix guy and a database guy.

The interesting thing is as we go down the route of outsourcing and internalizing components of the IT, where does ‘the business’ draw the line. Is it really in the business of buying servers? In installing Windows or buying data centers?

Is the way we want to go not one of moving all the elements of IT into one business line? One business line that comprises Market Data, Application support, Application development and infrastructure? Where I can say, I want a web based application running on Linux for my trading platforms, here’s what I want, can I have a system development and go-live cost? Where outages comprise one unified voice for the issues causing the outage, the activities raised to investigate and prevent re-occurence from the application and infrastructure mind set?

We’ll see, it’s one of these things which affects individual business differently, what happens in one business doesn’t mean it will happen in another.

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