Many IT organizations today are investigating how they can transform their departments from a cost center to a business enabler. Such a shift requires mutual understanding and close ties with business leaders, but high-tech leaders must also update IT staff, services, processes and technologies.

I already discussed recently how IT professionals in 2010 could be looking to update their resumes with new jobs that offer them more money and more opportunities to work with emerging technologies. And recent research shows that fluctuating demand for various IT skills points not only to the economic turmoil of the past two years but also to companies’ growing interest in new staffing models and potentially new IT service delivery models such as cloud computing.

A brief tour of blogs and articles posted online by IT industry watchers revealed that the trends are growing strong among the enterprise IT community. Forrester Research last week hosted its IT Forum 2010 in Las Vegas and firm vice president and research director Robert Whiteley blogged about encounters with clients at the show. For one IT professional, the discussion with Whiteley focused on IT job searches, Whiteley’s blog explains.

“It could be a sign that jobs are scarce, unemployment is up or that Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) professionals are being let go. But that's certainly not the case,” Whiteley writes.

This particular exchange involved on IT pro with desktop virtualization skills looking for a new opportunity and another discussion found Whiteley speaking with an IT pro looking to hire a high-tech worker with desktop virtualization skills. Despite the coincidence of the two discussions Whiteley highlights in his blog, he is quick to point out that there is something more going on than just a serendipitous event.

“These were not the only conversations I had with I&O execs on jobs, skills, and finding new talent. Clearly companies are investing for growth and in a people-oriented department like I&O, that means new jobs,” Whiteley says.

Whiteley also touches on IT cost management in his round-up from Forrester Research’s show. IT cost management is a well-known term that has been bandied about more since the economic recession once again slammed IT departments. But economics aren’t the only driver for IT organizations to consider adopting more consistent financial management practices. According to Whiteley’s experiences at IT Forum 2010, discussions on the topic of managing IT costs matured beyond making cuts to measuring value.

“What surprised me, though, was that people weren't asking how to contain costs, but how to measure them. Increasing levels of virtualization maturity and now the push to adopt cloud computing are completely disrupting standard cost methodologies,” Whiteley recalls in his blog post. “A lot of I&O execs were curious to know what tools and processes are available to build more rigorous cost models.”

Separately, an article in InformationWeek discusses how the Army is outlining a cloud computing strategy, proving there is more real-world examples to support the media hype around the technology. And a blog by CA Technologies’ Robert Stroud discusses the necessity for IT service management when it comes to adopting cloud computing.

“IT is changing! Businesses that once depended entirely on IT to deliver services are transitioning to a mix of internal IT and external service providers to meet the demands of their business,” Stroud writes in the blog post. “IT is going to be required to have a good understanding of how the supplier network components will work with the internally delivered components to deliver the service. Additionally IT is going to have to ensure that the aggregation of components is at a price that the service can bear and be delivered at an acceptable cost whilst meeting the performance SLA.”

Posted by Denise Dubie

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On The Daily WTF, there’s a great story about a network-oriented coder at the (name changed) “AQ&V.”

Here’s a quick summary:

“Mike” takes a job with AQ&V, and finds that the “network health” team, tasked with finding out about outages and performance problems before the customer, was not actually spending any time resolving issues, because each member of the team was spending all their time using internal apps to enter tickets and generate reports. 

No one on the team actually solved the problems. 

Mike then decided to code a kludge of a script which would automate most of the repetitive tasks that the network team was doing, freeing them up to actually fix some of the problems.  But when he tried to implement it, he found that the password to the development machine had been changed and that management had decided that they didn’t want him to actually solve problems – they just hired him to throw more manpower at entering trouble tickets… without solving them.

In the anecdote, as presented, it’s clear that AQ&V has a lot of problems with network performance – obviously, if you’re not fixing problems, problems will remain unresolved. 

But it’s unsurprising that Mike wasn’t able to make headway in solving the problem – the problem wasn’t just that nothing was actually getting fixed, but that management didn’t care that nothing was getting fixed. 

It’s not just that management blocked Mike’s kludge of a solution – but that they refused to acknowledge that there was a problem to begin with.  What Mike should have done was try to get management on board first, before writing a single line of code.  The first step in trying to improve any process in IT is convincing the people with the power to make decisions that the current process is flawed. 

If Mike was unable to convince management that the process needed to be solved, he would have been no worse off than he was at the end of the story; if he was able to convince management that there was a problem, then he might have been able to bring more resources to bear and instead of writing a kludge, actually spend time and effort on improving the process with a more stable solution to the problem.

We’re technical people and because of that, we tend to think that the solutions to problems are often technical.  The right code, the right script, and the problems are solved.  The problem is that enterprise computing isn’t just technical knowledge, it’s also social interaction – meeting needs, and convincing people that needs exist and should be met.  Because of this, tools that help you take information from your network and present them in a simple, easy to understand way can be just as important as tools which directly solve problems – the former to convince management of the need for the latter. 

This story reminds me of rudimentary ITIL principals and the requirement for the “people” part to participate in the process change. Incident Management may be the first step most organizations get under control – but that’s not just entering tickets.  It’s also finding the quickest way to restore service.  Problem management—solving problems—is much easier when Incident Management is done right because you’ll have priorities and begin to see patterns, but “AQ&V” wasn’t even scratching the surface on Incident Management, so there was little chance to evolve. The situation was like a bad sitcom.

In a few minutes, Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler, and Associates, will be delivering his keynote on the Next Generation NOC at NetQoS Symposium 2008 at Barton Creek Resort in Austin. Last week, we pre-recorded a podcast with Dr. Metzler regarding the speech he is about to give and what he means by a "next generation NOC."

He talks about the changing role of the NOC and moves in enterprises towards integrating what were once seperate stovepipe functions to focus on application delivery.

The podcast is below.

The Wall Street Journal has a column by Amit Basu and Chip Jarnagin about how most companies are failing to recognize the potential of IT, and they list a number of reasons why.

First, Basu and Jarnagin say, the business often sees IT as a basic utility, like plumbing or phone service. This is compounded by the current trend towards SaaS; in which prominent authors like Nick Carr are actually sincerely arguing that IT is indeed a basic utility, and that "IT doesn't matter." We disagreed with that argument on the basis that those companies that use unique IT resources and talent effectively will outperform those companies who do not, but agreed with the general trends that Carr pointed out. The problem that many overlook is that IT as a utility and IT as an innovator are not mutually exclusive propositions. (Remember when your cable company just provided TV?)

Additionally, Basu and Jarnagin argue that there is an effective glass wall isolating IT within the company, and there are five reasons for this wall separating IT and the rest of the business.

"Mind-set differences between management staff and IT staff, language differences, social influences, flaws in IT governance (defined as the specification and control of IT decision rights), and the difficulty of managing rapidly changing technology."

The first case, of mindset differences between IT teams and business leaders is one of abstract vs. logical thinking. IT teams often deal in binary logic; something works or it does not, something is better or it is not. There is a right way, a wrong way, and sometimes a best way, to do things. Business leadership often deals in the grey areas, what ifs, and sometimes illogical intuition.

To oversimplify, IT thinks in the terms of the math class - there is a right and wrong answer. Management is liberal arts - arguments should be well formed but there's no one right way to get to the answer. For all the jokes between management and IT working on totally different wavelengths, there is an absolute truth to this.

Also, as Basu and Jarnagin point out, both business and IT use incomprehensible languages filled with acronyms and specialized terms. I know most of you are familiar with "VoIP," "packet priority," and "ITIL" but to a business manager, they're as alien as "EBITDA," "commodity value," and "ISPL" are to a network engineer.

(A digression: When I first started working at this position, I came from an academic background. It confused me to no end that when the marketing people were talking about "the pipe" and the networking people were talking about "the pipe" they meant two entirely different things.)

There are other, social, factors mentioned in the article as well, but the end result is that business doesn't want to deal with IT, doesn't care about IT, and doesn't understand how IT helps their business. And yet, IT is still crucial to meeting business goals.

We've talked many times about the need for better IT communication, and better understanding of business needs in IT. Mostly, we agree with Basu and Jarnagin's assessments of the situation, and really do recommend that you read the article - and perhaps forward it to your manager.

This is where ITIL can help out considerably. One of the major improvements in ITIL v3 from v2 is the shift from business alignment to business integration, which requires IT to adopt business terms and to create, measure and communicate IT value in financial terms whenever possible.

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• erp4it: ITIL and ITSM politics

Continue reading "Daily Links: Business transaction monitoring, new Cisco switch, network endpoint explosion, plus more" »

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Continue reading "Daily Links: Gartner Enterprise Summit, Cisco router gain, YouTube and bandwidth, ITIL compliance, IT certifications" »

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Continue reading "Network Performance Daily Links 2006-10-24" »