Being a True Business Partner as an Infrastructure & Operations Manager

Several things I have been working on lately seem to have a common theme, defining “what is enough”, enough redundancy, process, response time etc.. I have spent some time studying several of the popular Infrastructure and Operations maturity models as defined by industry leaders such as Gartner, Forrester or IDC. All of these models make the not so implicit assumption that you “should” be driving your IT department “Up” the model. In Gartner's model for example, your IT operation is not considered a “business partner” until you have ascended through all the various layers, each requiring higher levels of process discipline, scalability and business service uptime. On the surface it seems hard to argue against continuous improvement as it relates to your IT operations. I certainly believe you should always search for ways to run your IT operation or to build your IT infrastructure in better ways, however it seems an over generalization to imply that you ALWAYS need more process, more redundancy etc.. I would make the argument that to be a true partner to the business, you as an IT leader should focus on defining exactly what your business is trying to accomplish in the marketplace and target your level of IT infrastructure and operations rigor accordingly. It may be tough for the die hard technology professional to accept that a certain degree of risk is acceptable or that it is OK to not be on the latest hardware or software. What really enables you to drive value for the business is understanding the level at which your business “needs” you to operate and ensuring that you do not operate below or ABOVE that level. Operating below an acceptable level in terms of service levels, infrastructure scalability or redundancy certainly puts your business and its go to market strategy at risk. Operating above where your business needs you to be may be diverting capital and resources away from more value added activities whose value to the business outweighs the risks you may be taking in certain areas of your IT operations. So before you to go your CFO and start showing him or her charts and models outlining where you SHOULD be as an IT organization, make sure you have a clear understanding of where your business NEEDS you to be.

Are You Over Virtualizing Your Technology Infrastructure?

In a recent key note address at Gartner’s 2010 Infrastructure and Operations Summit, Raymond Paquet, Managing VP at Gartner, made the point that consistently over the last eight years 64% of the typical IT budget has been dedicated to tactical operations such as running existing infrastructure. A driving factor behind this consistent trend is the tendency of technology managers to over deliver on infrastructure services to the business. Paquet makes the point that technology managers should always be focused on providing the right balance between technology solution cost and the quality of service the solution provides to the business. As the quality of a technology service increases the cost of that service will naturally increase. There is often still a gap in the quality of service a business requires and what is architected and built by technology professionals. The key is to understand the businesses requirements in terms of parameters such as uptime, scalability and recoverability and to architect an infrastructure aligned with these requirements. Sounds simple, right? Often however technology professionals find themselves (usually inadvertently) swept up in implementing technology solutions that at specific levels of adoption add value to a business but at unnecessary levels of adoption serve to pull budgets and resources away from more value added activities. Virtualization is a case in point.

The gap between quality of technology services required by the business and the cost to deliver them can be observed today in the tenacious drive by many technology managers to virtualize 100% of their IT infrastructure. Gartner research VP Phillip Dawson points out what he calls the “The Rule of Thirds” with respect to virtualizing IT workloads. The theory is that one third of your IT workload will be “easy” to virtualize, another one third will be “moderately difficult” with the remaining third being “difficult” to virtualize. Most technology organizations today have conquered the easy one third and have began working on the moderately difficult workloads. The cost in terms of effort and dollars to virtualize the final one third of your IT workload increases exponentially. Are you really adding value to your business by driving 100% of your environment into your virtualization strategy? The recommendation from Dawson is to first simplify IT workloads as much as possible by driving towards well run x86 architectures. Once simplified, IT workloads with low business value should be evaluated for outsourcing or retirement. Retirement may consist of moving the service the application provides into an existing ERP system thus leveraging existing infrastructure. Workloads with high business value will likely now (after simplification) be cost effective to bring into your virtualization strategy.



So be selective in the applications you target for virtualization. Be sure that all steps have been taken to simplify the respective applications technology infrastructure so that it is not in the upper third of costs and effort in terms of virtualization effort. Outsource or retire complex applications where applicable rather than force fitting them into your own virtualization strategy. Look for ways to retire low business value applications with complex technology architectures (such as moving them into an existing ERP package). The bottom line is that all technology investments and initiatives must be aligned with your organizations needs and risk tolerance. Virtualization is no different. Making unnecessary efforts to virtualize certain applications may be doing more harm than good.