Blade Watch

http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/21/enterprise-information-business-technology-cio-network-woods.html

Right now, about 70% of IT costs go toward keep existing systems running; only 30% finances new development. Without chargeback, business has little incentive to demand efficiency. The size and scope of existing systems grows, crowding out innovation.

A great article and absolutely right, the challenge is that business users often do not understand and are often not willing to participate or pay their true cost – £900 for a fully supported desktop, that is outrageous, I can buy a pc from Dell/HP/Acer for half that price. Correct, but it needs to be the enterprise build, it needs to have specific application based support, (IT cannot say it’s your problem, the pc is fine) we have to diagnose and investigate. Also, as part of that cost, we have to provide email infrastructure, user drive space, departmental drives, file and print services, backup and restore, helpdesk, standards and an enterprise build which continues to evolve with the business need and vendor recommendations.

We need to therefore could look at moving towards in essence the compartmentalized approach offering clear distinctions and migration paths between support levels:
Entry level – if it breaks it is replaced at no cost/reconfigured to an operational state based on enteprise standards
Medium level – we will diagnose the issue for three hours and then rebuild or replace
Maximum level – we will diagnose the issue and escalate to vendors to resolve the issue.

The challenge is that everyone tends to either go for entry or medium level support but expect maximum level support, and what IT needs to be doing as a business is saying in essence, do you want the best service at the lowest cost? Yes. Fine, rip and replace  is the concept. It is inefficient to have people spending days analyzing commodity problems and issues, why are we rebuilding a four year old desktop when it is out of warranty and has little or no asset value? Why are we rebuilding legacy x86 servers when I can provide you with a virtual machine working out of the box in say 35 minutes?

The problem is threefold, it’s a cultural shift:
Users can feel that they are not getting value for money, and if your IT isn’t managed properly it gets lazy and just replaces everything rather than fix it – when its actually ok and just needs say a rebuild or a new disk fitted – the example we had last week with a colleague, he had logged a call to rebuild his Dell Optiplex GX270 with Windows XP because it was getting a bit bloated and slow, to be told it’s out of support, buy a new machine – unreasonable he thought.

IT needs to have the preanswers, the costs, the business justification and not the usual IT stuff that are told to users – users have pcs at home, they understand what a server is, out of support just isn’t good enough. IT needs to own what it does, have a unified voice, a relationship with its user base, change the conversation away from the existing business as usual, to innovative service improving, making a difference answering the business need. In most cases, it’s ever such simple stuff, clearing down the pc drives, defragging the servers and applying the firmware/patches, being proactive.

If we continue down the computer says no route we are in danger of ourselves on two fronts, in danger because we are perceived rightly or wrongly not to deliver – who can we get to make it work, and secondly from cloud, from grid or outsourcing, because they can make it work, regardless of what spin or debates we put in place.

Let us as end users and as an IT community step up to the game, establish where we can make a difference, start a dialogue with the business sponsors on agreed quick win scenarios and work on fixing the real issues along side the simple ones. With the easy calls sorted, we will have more time to spend on innovation, service improvement and adding value.

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