Bladewatch.com

rpath blog

Let’s face it: Nobody likes change.

And nobody likes it less than enterprise IT, which has come to fear change as a malevolent force—the unwelcomed houseguest—that invariably leads to unintended consequences.

When change arrives, bad things tend to happen.

Of course, IT has good reason to be fearful—change is incredibly disruptive to production environments. And it’s becoming more so with the growing complexity of software systems—more sources of change, faster rates of change and more systems to maintain.

IT has good reason to be afraid.

An interesting post, I have often thought that we should be looking at service delivery improvement projects from about three different angles, and it’s something I discussed with a consultancy a few years ago, the three phased approach:

• End user perceived experience – what is the level of service I actually get when logging a call regardless of your statistics?
• Application support team experience – what is their level of service, what barriers to delivery do they have technically/operationally and what issues are affecting them?
• Infrastructure support team experience – what issues are they having in their delivery and how could we streamline support and delivery – lights out connectivity – simply refreshing the hardware?

Tied into all this though is inventory, inventory, inventory, this includes application mapping to infrastructure resources and business lines, combined with infrastructure mapping knowing what it is we have and what the priorities should be. The more we understand the applications and the underlying infrastructure, the more we can do proper change analysis, the more we can examine where the bottlenecks are, take the big decisions and work on a basis of service transformation, rather than Keeping the Show On the Road – KSOR as we sometimes call it. Keeping still leads to:

• Legacy infrastructure with its inherent support and maintenance issues
• Issues relating to application source code, reliability as well as limits to bug fixes or functionality enhancements, sorry Windows 2000 does not support .Net 3.5
• Data center space being used inefficiently – we have five hundred servers taking which could be replaced with 90 new ones – what savings are we not realizing?
• User perception issues – users can so easily just accept mediocrity and rather than complain – what do you mean we’re rubbish and you’re taking service elsewhere, you’ve never said, is there any point?
• Everything becomes a massive project – we’re changing our SAN switch which suddenly means new fibre cards, new servers, new operating systems, new application code and new server names, all because we left everything age rather continue to evolve and invest in the infrastructure.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.