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With the economic conditions we’ve seen a range of organizations from retail to the investment banks cutting costs and people in order to reduce costs (see this article). Cutting contractors, pulling projects can provide an instant cost reduction but I’ve always wondered if this isn’t cyclical and cost businesses more in the long run? By this I mean not just in terms of stop/start costs, but also in terms of service delivery. The way it works is that as business does well, IT gets more funding, employs more people to help with projects or business as usual support, as business gets harder, business will cut back often to the point at which IT is unable to meet it’s service level agreements, it’s unable to deliver, so we start the cycle again, recruit more people.

The core reason though your IT isn’t delivering is not financial, it’s operational and political.  We’ll go over what I mean in a few minutes, but the key factor is that IT is seen as a cost rather than an investment, in doing so you place IT on the offensive in terms of justifying head count, justifying existence, the old “but you didn’t ask for that, so we didn’t supply it.”, it’s a two way street and as IT gets integral to the business, as we see more restructuring, the business doing more of the IT tasks and IT becoming more architectural, this will change.

A prime example of justifying headcount is this. If I run a windows server team and I keep missing calls, do I not automatically get justification for more head count? Is it more headcount that I need or just people and workload management I need? Are the existing processes working in a way that rewards failure and how is it related to the way you reward your team? Do managers with bigger teams not get more ‘rewards’ or kudos, is this not anti business in terms of cost and delivery?

We need to manage the concept that bigger isn’t always better, there are compliance issues of course – but consider the difference between having 10 engineers and five really good expensive ones that you can call all the time. The five really good ones will adapt your infrastructure, your monitoring to make sure they don’t need called. We need to abstract our businesses from ‘industry standards’ in terms of rewards and switch to one that works, that delivers for our business, industry standard is fine, but if it means that I am unable to get the right people, it’s costing your business more in the long term.

In the meantime:

Ineffective communication internally and with external users:

• What are our standards – why do we have them, how do I deploy an application which does not conform to these standards
• How do I request a desktop – what do I need, what questions will I be asked
• I want a free desktop, how can I do this?
• How do I request a server – what do I need, what questions will I be asked
• What do I need in order to request remote access for support/remote working?
• Why does IT enforce replacing the server after three years – cost illustration example/marginal benefit etc
• Why can’t I get a bigger user/departmental drive? I can get a drive from PC world which is 200GB
• I want to move a server – what do I need to know

We need to use blogs, wiki’s, team information, accountability, support issues – how do I health check a server? How do I health check applicationbatch7? We need the Pre-Answers and a tool to connect and communicate with end users managed by the help desk.

Inventory information is inaccurate

The main issue is the number of inventories, the asset purchasing database, the server list, the application list, the internal team databases/inventories or spreadsheets. Nothing typically ties up, if I ask the asset team how many DL380′s I have they can’t tell me that, they can tell me how many purchases we made in 2002 though, if I ask the server guys, they might say 300, the application team might say 7. But getting an overall picture one, that works isn’t always that easy. Just like the NHS, moving towards a central platform for data reporting/presentation becomes ever more important – for your server, your application to be supported, it needs to be in the live production system list.

But consider that your inventory, your list of servers affects:

• Billing
• Software licenses purchased
• Hardware support contract coverage
• Cross charging in terms of monitoring or middle-ware tools -  how many SQL/Oracle databases
• Who owns what – who gets called at 3am when it goes bang?

Operational in terms of budgets/accountability

We need budgets and accountability to illustrate what IT is doing, how it’s adding value to working for you, but at the same time, there needs to be built into the budgets a stuff field, where I can simply give someone an infrastructure task and say get on with it.

The prime example of this was Chris down in not so sunny Canary Wharf, he’s been trying to get IBM Director to work with their monitoring tool, however this requires a day or two of monitoring guys’ time, however he can’t get anyone to say yes to book the guy for the day or so. In the meantime, Chris spends an hour a day checking Director manually, when a blade blows up, they know when the monitoring tool reports ‘ping down’ and he reacts accordingly. If we consider the outage cost, the inconvenience and ‘cost of unexpected outage’, the bank has paid about twelve times over in indirect/support cost.

Lack of investment in the right way

This covers a number of things, the way we deploy IT, the short term thinking, the strategies which are written in stone but then overriden by pressing button seven, (I’ll explain in a minute).

Time to build

One of the regular complaints we get is the time of build, how long it takes to ‘build’ a server, but then is this not a result of a number of issues, lack of team work between the teams deploying that server, a server build that is designed for everyone and no-one at the same time. You’ll often find the build is created and managed for a specific site, in a Canadian bank, Canada make the build, but it will work for their region, where they might have DHCP boot, where there’s a build network, but the office in Scunthorpe doesn’t have a build network, so the guy has to sit manually and switch the cables or boot into the bios and change the network card boot order. The site in London is Front Office trading, so there is no dhcp, and they need a hardended Internet facing build – but that isn’t deemed as a priority by Canada, because Canada don’t have that requirement. In the meantime, as IT we have to tinker with the build, harden the existing build, test it, adapt it, all of which delays your go-live.

Different organizational standards

There needs to be different standards between enterprise, but can we consider the cost of support, that by validating more platforms means more testing, more delays, if we only had to support three types of pc and laptop we could package and update so much more quickly. But this requires a change in concepts, a change in billing and accountability, a move to fixed cost computing, either the remote sites get virtual pc’s/thin clients, or (including the enterprise), the pc is replaced to a set model every two years, anything not that model isn’t supported.

Investment in the application infrastructure but not IT

We need to be including the infrastructure in projects, by that I mean, as we bring online new applications, new systems, we need to include extra capacity and investment for performance monitoring, for application and infrastructure monitoring for management. To avoid those situations where an application goes live on infrastructure that is difficult to monitor or manage because there was no budget for time to configure the firewalls or have a management server in place.

Spend on support

The spend on support can often be too high for a number of reasons, your teams are reactive and the queues are reacted to not managed, your teams do not effectively work together and there can easily be the avoid speaking to Mike as he’s emotional. Related to this requires a key statement which I remember a CIO telling me about, “GET ON WITH IT”

Focus on delivery – I have a team of 8 windows engineers, I want three doing incidents, one doing infrastructure analysis and improvement (Insight Manager/Inventory updates), the rest doing requests/tasks. I want the manager shouting across how you doing with that call, can you take a look at this one…

Focus on how we work together as a team -  communicate our needs, what our operational goals and issues are – bad air over a lack of access, or a system causing issue can be so easily be resolved.

Delays in delivery or excellence simply because of poor people management, that Mike is emotional means the escalation teams try not to call Mike, is this not a problem on several levels. That escalation don’t have the access and the skills to do the first line? That Mike isn’t approachable, can we not reboot him?

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