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InfoWorld

Previous design choices have resulted in not meeting the needs of the business. In particular, these design choices have resulted in complexity, waste, performance barriers, and cost models that don’t work for the business. Lack of understanding and transparency of what has been done in the past will continue to create misalignment with business needs if not addressed.

A great article with some good points. Is it not a mixture of things though?

IT buys and charges back a server to the end user. Therefore the end user specifies the server required (typically). IT provides an operating system, loads an application and provides support to the end user. But typically the development team, the application support team does not work for IT. Oh they’re IT but they’re paid for the business. With that in mind, the way the finances work, and life in general, what we lack is two things; delivery and direction. Is it not that IT does not own the IT, it provides it?

Delivery in terms of having the IT teams accountable to the end user, to avoid the calls bouncing around the system, to switch from “server guy” or “desktop guy” to service delivery guy who does server or desktop stuff. As an end user, I want call ownership not management. If you don’t deal with it, can you find someone that does and let them know so we can get it fixed. Not always easy in a large enterprise.

Direction, in terms of the need to switch to a more pre-provisioning fixed cost method of billing, of deployment. An IT where there are fewer surprises, where the business focus on revenue generation and IT just works. You get your pc (virtual or physical), from the day you sign to say it’s yours. You have it for two or three years. Then you get allocated a new one, no debates, no extra cost. It just is.

It’s cheaper to replace an end users’ pc every year, to avoid the ‘pc is slow’ fault calls, to reduce the need for spare parts on stock, to make our users less pc dependent, to make the pc the client, making the network the infrastructure and the application. That the pc is merely the connecting device, the handset, everything else being web, citrix or grid basd. Taking that to the server model and consider what could be acheived within IT in terms of support costs, of application resilence and delivery.

A virtual server environment paid for by IT, which IT owns and runs, you pay your service fee, you request your resilience, your availability and your peak hours required. Capacity, what hardware it runs on and what operating system is used is all an IT concern. You just pay for what you use. I need 30 cpus for 35 hours a week, the application needs Oracle and a php web front end, what’s the cost per week?

As we move to the virtual world, these things could very well change, exciting times are ahead. How we move forward in terms of process, technology and in business will be what matters.

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