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Sun, Jul 15, 2007 20:46 EDT
Making IT Matter
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Posted by: Michael Kavis in Soapbox Topic: ArchitectureBlog: Delivering the Goods
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We have all read and debated Nick Carr's book, Does IT Matter. As I look at some of the initiatives that IT shops are taking on these days I'd have to say that IT is trying to prove Mr. Carr wrong. This is the golden age of technology. I haven't seen a time so exciting since the Internet started catching on or since the .Com days.
Look at some of the top innovative initiatives that are grabbing the headlines today.
- Business Process Management (BPM)
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
- Enterprise 2.0
- Virtualization
- Green IT
BPM. I wrote this article (How did we become a Dilbert cartoon?) a few months back that discusses how IT has become unaligned with the business over the years preoccupying itself with hardware upgrades and OS patches. BPM is allowing IT to make a comeback by once again aligning with the business to help the business become more productive and cost effective.
SOA. This is another hot area where IT is finally starting to invest in architecture to allow the sharing of services between applications both internally to the company and externally with partners and customers. If done right, SOA can provide huge improvements in speed to market and major reductions in maintenance and support.
Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 is all about leveraging the improved Web 2.0 collaboration tools in the work place. As the baby boomer's move on and the younger generations enter the work place, never have we had so many Internet savvy users in the work place. The younger generation has taught us the value of social networking, collective intelligence, tagging, blogs, RSS feeds, and many other collaboration tools. These technologies are drastically changing the way the world collaborates and moves collaboration beyond the walls of one's own corporation. Companies that invest in Enterprise 2.0 technologies will reap the benefits of allowing the workforce to bubble up great ideas from the trenches while making their employees more productive.
Virtualization. Talk about exciting. Now with products like VMware, companies can drastically reduce the amount of servers they need to buy and maintain. Less servers means reduced heat, electricity, and floor space which leads to lower costs. Gone are the long procurement cycles where it may take several weeks
bpm, Enterprise 2.0, green IT, Open Source, SOA, virtualization, Web 2.0
Great column! I think advances in a number of exciting technologies are really coming together to help align IT and Business.
Although BPM, SOA and virtualization initiatives all help us deliver the type of services the business needs to deliver shareholder value and compete in the marketplace, they add a stunning amount of complexity. For IT, especially the Operations folks, this makes it nearly impossible to manage performance and availability to required service levels. The old paradigm of systems monitoring, event management and problem resolution will simply break under the weight of all this complexity and abstraction.
So it isn’t enough to just implement these things advances on the delivery side. We also have to prepare Operations for the change:
- We have to think in terms of managing the delivery of services rather than the reliability of systems
We have to move away from labor-intensive deterministic approaches (i.e. “monitor and respond to everything”) to a “probability and priority” approach.
We have to use tools instead of labor to correlate events associate them with real problems.
We have to get out of “break-fix” mode and into a proactive and predictive Operations process paradigm.
There is no doubt BPM, SOA and virtualization are here to stay. They bring agility, alignment and efficiency to both the business side and IT. But the initiaives around these will only succeed if we bring our Operations disciplines and practices along for the ride.
I agree. That is where the enterprise service bus (ESB) comes in. You should leverage the ESB to centrally manage the security, transformation, routing, service management, and other functions. The ESB will log/audit all events and processes and gives you dashboard and BI reporting to proactively monitor your production environment.
The same is true for virtualization. There are management tools that allow you to proactively manage your virtual sessions.
Strategies to move IT from a cost center to business enabler.
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