Posts Tagged ‘TCO’
A Good Start Point for Devops – Guest Post by Peter McGarahan
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevepj2009/3461077400/
Many of the devops posts in this blog were written from a dev perspective. Today’s guest post by Peter McGarahan examines the topic from the ops perspective. It is inspired by the following eloquent quip about change:
Assume we’re starting from scratch. Assume that we actually are a startup that doesn’t have over a hundred years of experience and sub-optimized IT legacy.
A few biographical details for readers who might not know Peter or know of him. Peter J. McGarahan is the founder and president of McGarahan & Associates, an IT Service Management consulting and training organization. Peter offers 27 years of IT and Business Service Management experience in optimizing and aligning the service and support organizations of the Fortune 1000 to deliver value against business objectives. His thought leadership has influenced the maturity and image of the service and support industry. His passion for customer service led the Taco Bell support organization to achieve the Help Desk Institute Team Excellence Award in 1995. IT Support News named him one of the “Top 25 Professionals in the Service and Support Industry” in 1999. Support professionals voted McGarahan “The Legend of the Year” in 2002 and again in 2004 at the Service Desk Professionals conference for his endless energy, mentoring and leadership coaching. As a practitioner, product manager and support industry analyst and expert, McGarahan has left his service signature on the support industry / community.
Here is Peter:
As a former Director of Infrastructure & Operations (I&O), I found it beneficial to establish a respectful working relationship with my Development Colleagues. It was important for the accountable leaders to better understand the objectives, workings and success metrics of each team. It was also critical for the leader to establish the ‘rules of engagement’ for how each team would assist each other in achieving their stated objectives (success metrics). It certainly helped to have an IT / Business leader who established a cooperative / collaborative teamwork culture. She also supported it with shared IT / Business objectives and performance goals for all accountable IT leaders. The I&O team certainly benefited from a CIO who understood the importance of customer service, the value of support and the business impact (negative IT perception) caused by repetitive incidents, problems and service disruptions. It was a game changing day for I&O when the CIO announced that all accountable leaders would have half of their performance objectives (bonus compensation) based on the success metrics of the I&O team.
In working with Infrastructure & Operations organizations, it has become apparent that as we continue to implement, measure and continuously improve the IT Infrastructure Library v3 (ITIL) processes, we must simultaneously address how we focus on all things new! In a recent Cutter Executive Update entitled IT’s Change Imperative, I relate lessons learned from my conversations with Geir Ramleth, CIO of Bechtel and Ron Griffin, Senior VP of Applications for Hewlett-Packard. Their leadership, vision and courage inspired me to think differently about how IT can better work together for the benefit of the business. In the end, the only success that matters – is the continued growth and profitability of the business. A summary of their change success stories:
- Hewlett-Packard CIO Randy Mott hired the right people to implement his IT strategy and change plan that included building, consolidating and automating its data centers; transferred work in-house from contractors; standardized on only a quarter of its apps; and built one central data warehouse — all while cutting spending in half.
- Geir Ramleth, CIO of Bechtel described how he used cloud computing principles to transform IT and make Bechtel’s computing environment more agile. He had a vision of allowing Bechtal’s global employees access to the right resources at any place at any time with any device – delivered securely and cost-effectively. He encouraged his IT people to step outside their comfort zones and do things in a different way. He resisted modifying the current state and went with the transformational change fearing they would only wind-up incrementally better. In targeting a desired end state, he gave his team guiding instructions to “Assume we’re starting from scratch. Assume that we actually are a startup that doesn’t have over a hundred years of experience and sub-optimized IT legacy.”
In the spirit of change, we should challenge ourselves to develop shared ‘devops’ goals / objectives. In the end, these should help us identify, link and realize how to translate IT objectives / metrics into tangible business benefits / value.
I have listed some shared ‘devops’ goals / objectives that I believe are a good starting point. I encourage and invite your thoughts, opinions and ideas around these and any others that you feel would aid ‘devops’ in working to establish measurable business value credibility.
- Lower the total cost of ownership of all services (best way to achieve this is build them with serviceability, usability and maintainability in the design of all new applications, systems and services).
- Increase business value – achieve business benefits (lower operational costs, increased revenues, improved customer experience)
- Simplified navigation
- Productivity enhancing capabilities /functionality
- Plug ‘n play integration
- Personalization
- Training / On-line Self-help features
3. Minimize business impact
- Reduce change-related outages / incidents.
- Reduce number of problems / incidents / calls.
- Reduce the number of requests / training-related calls / inquiries.
- Provide insights and tracking to the number of Known errors / workarounds / knowledge articles (solutions).
- Speed to resolution based on business prioritization model
- Operating Level Agreement / Commitment between Single Point of Contact (SPOC) Service Desk and internal IT Service Providers based on response / resolution times / commitments.
- Bug-fix Process:
– Provide insights into the ‘bug/fix/enhancement’ list and process with transparent visibility to business prioritization (needs / requirements / quantifiable benefits).
4. Improved and frequent Communication
- A marketing / product launch / status update and awareness campaign.
- Especially around rollout / enhancement time.
Cloud Computing Forecasts: “Cloudy” Future for Enterprise IT
In a comment on The Urgency of Now, Marcel Den Hartog discusses technology assimilation in the face of hype:
But if people are already reluctant to run the things they have, on another platform they already have, on an operating system they are already familiar with (Linux on zSeries), how can you expect them to even look at cloud computing seriously? Every technological advancement requires people to adapt and change. Human nature is that we don’t like that, so it often requires a disaster to change our behavior. Or carefully planned steps to prove and convince people. However, nothing makes IT people more cautious than a hype. And that is how cloud is perceived. When the press, the analysts and the industry start writing about cloud as part of the IT solution, people will want to change. Now that it’s presented as the silver bullet to all IT problems, people are cautious to say the least.
Here is Annie Shum‘s thoughtful reply to Marcel’s comment:
Today, the Cloud era has only just begun. Despite lingering doubts, growing concerns and wide-spread confusion (especially separating media and vendor spun hype from reality), the IT industry generally views Cloud Computing as more appealing than traditional ASP /hosting or outsourcing/off-shoring. To technology-centric startups and nimble entrepreneurs, Cloud Computing enables them to punch above their weight class. By turning up-front CapEx into a more scalable and variable cost structure based on an on-demand pay-as-you-go model, Cloud Computing can provide a temporary, level playing field. Similarly, many budget-constrained and cash-strapped organizations also look to Cloud Computing for immediate (friction-free) access to “unlimited” computing resources. To wit: Cloud Computing may be considered as a utility-based alternative to an on-premises datacenter and allow an organization (notably cash-strapped startups) to “Think like a ‘big guy’. Pay like a ‘little guy’ ”.
Forward-thinking organizations should not lose sight of the vast potential of Cloud Computing that extends well beyond short-term economics. At its core, Cloud Computing is about enabling business agility and connectivity by abstracting computing infrastructure via a new set of flexible service delivery/deployment models. Harvard Business School Professor Andrew McAffee painted a “Cloudy” future for Corporate IT in his August 21, 2009 blog and cited a perceptive 1983 paper by Warren D. Devine, Jr. in the Journal of Economic History called “From Shafts to Wires: Historical Perspective on Electrification”.[1] There are three key take-away messages that resonate with the current Cloud Computing paradigm shift. First: The real impact of the new technology was not apparent right away. Second: The transition to full utilization of the new technology will be long, but inevitable. Third: There will be detractors and skeptics about the new technology throughout the transition. Interestingly, telephone is another groundbreaking disruptive technology that might have faced similar skepticism in the beginning. Legend has it that a Western Union internal memo dated 1876 downplayed the viability of the telephone: “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communications. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
The dominance of Cloud Computing as a computing platform, however, is far from a fait accompli. Nor will it ever be complete, a “one-size fits all” or a “big and overnight switch”. The shape of computing is constantly changing but it is always a blended and gradual transition, analogous to a modern city. While the cityscape continues to change, a complete “rip-and-replace” overhaul is rarely feasible or cost-effective. Instead, city planners generally preserve legacy structures although some of them are retrofitted with standards-based interfaces that enable them to connect to the shared infrastructure of the city. For example, the Paris city planners retrofitted Notre Dame with facilities such as electricity, water, and plumbing. Similarly, despite the passage of the last three computing paradigm shifts – first mainframe, next Client/Server and PCs, and then Web N-tier – they all co-exist and can be expected to continue in the future. Consider the following. Major shares of mission-critical business applications are running today on mainframe servers. Through application modernization, legacy applications – notably Cobol for example – now can operate in a Web 2.0 environment as well as deploy in the Cloud via the Amazon EC2 platform.
Cloud Computing can provide great appeal to a wide swath of organizations spanning startups, SMBs, ISVs, enterprise IT and government agencies. The most commonly cited benefits include the promise of avoiding CapEx and lowering TCO to on-demand elasticity, immediacy and ease of deployment, time to value, location independence and catalyzing innovation. However, there is no magic in the Cloud and it is certainly not a panacea for all IT woes. Some applications are not “Cloud-friendly”. While deploying applications in the Cloud can enable business agility incrementally, such deployment will not change the characteristics of the applications fundamentally to be highly scalable, flexible and automatically responsive to new business requirements. Realistically, one must recognize that the many of the challenging problems – security, data integration and service interoperability in particular – will persist and live on regardless of the computing delivery medium: Cloud, hosted or on-premises.
[1] “The author combed through the contemporaneous business and technology press to learn what ‘experts’ were saying as manufacturing switched over from steam to electrical power, a process that took about 50 years to complete.” – Andrew McAfee, September 21, 2009.
I will go one step further and add quality to Annie’s list of challenging problem. A crappy on-premises application will continue to be crappy in the cloud. An audit of the technical debt should be conducted before “clouding” an application. See Technical Debt on Your Balance Sheet for a recommendation on quantifying the results of the quality audit.
The Agile Executive 