Blade Watch

I was speaking with a delivery manager in the ‘blade team’ over at one of the multinationals and she was saying how the business had ‘taken over’ managing their blade farm from IT and ‘had transformed’ delivery, they had slashed costs and managed to vastly improve the end user perception of their blade farm.

I was intrigued and asked more about their achievements and why they felt IT was so poor at delivery. The statements ranged from inflexibility (taking too long and being ‘unresponsive’), to costs (internal cross charging), and being impacted by IT standards on delivery and process.   It was interesting getting the answers to the following questions:

Who prepared the operating system build?

IT adapted their build for our blades.

Who provided hardware support for the blades

An external service provider through our support contract.

Who prepared the data center environmental configuration?

IT and facilities managed the data center configuration and kitted it out to meet our requirements.

Who co-ordinated out of hours support and managed batch/workloads?

IT have a central team providing 24/7 monitoring of the infrastructure, our blades and the batch using monitoring tools.

Is the issue then, not that the blade team had transformed the way it did things, it had:

• Streamlined the blade build and created one unified voice using using IT as the layer to provide the core infrastructure
• That the blade team were still dependent on IT backing for the application and infrastructure monitoring and core infrastructure components

What we have to be careful of is that dangerous statement of ‘we can do it better’, yes with the difficult and ‘boring’ bits taken away and provided as a core service, we can absolutely do it better, but we have to remember that:

• IT has to be all things to all people
• IT standards are there for a reason
• IT budgets are always too high and delivery too poor

Without being emotional. The issue was not a success as much as it was failure. IT had failed in terms of relationships and branding. Both in terms of ‘establishing the blade team’, of catering to a specific business line or application need, and in selling its success at providing the core infrastructure which underpins the blade farm – let us not forget, without the data center your blades are of little benefit.

I wish we could see two things, IT being run more as a business with business backing rather than the often ‘cost’ debate combined with IT having a sense of branding and purpose. Would the business ever entertain one guy in accounts demanding that ‘his printer’ be a LaserJet 5SI because he’s had that printer and his deparment ‘isn’t paying for a new printer’, or put up with a developer demanding that his 8 year old server be upgraded to 1GB RAM rather than have a virtual machine or a new server because ‘it would take too long’ to migrate and test the code. Only because we accept this behaviour, because we set the benchmark do we let it continue and in doing so, damage our delivery and our revenues – a service provider would reply in both cases, fine fill your boots, but this is the true cost – oh you mean you didn’t mean it, fine we’ll deploy the new solution.

IT is a product, a service, a brand, the moment you as the IT and the business understand that and practice it, both in terms of reporting, delivering and managing, is the moment you transform your delivery, your business perception and by the nature of the game your process. Remember that when you deliver, no one really asks about costs, as soon though as people see an opportunity for head count, for budgets, it is then that we see:
Business alignment with IT – we can do it better but do you know the complexity of the IT infrastructure – and is it IT services you want a business line doing or is it earning revenue?
Cloud and outsourcing – but have you considered that the things you are able to do with your own IT would not be supported from an outsourced venture – sorry we don’t do that here, but sign this large disclaimer, and pay a fee and we might be able to. With internal IT, it costs you an email, “do you know who I am, I accept the risk, next.”

It takes to difficult things:

• Saying no to people
• Demanding more – better application code, better investment where necessary and enforcing the stability of production.
• Just doing it – no choice, no debate, there is a server, you have three weeks to move to it, because then we decommission your DL360 G2.

The most successful projects have been the ones where IT has been given the magic email, to which it can forward to when people say no:

“I don’t want a new pc, or a new monitor, I like my 22″ CRT display, I like my desktop it’s got all my files on it.”. Fine sir, absolutely sir, here’s an email from the CEO, you can raise it with him, in the meantime, the new pc and screen will be here on Friday between 3 and 4pm.

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