It is early March 2010 as I write this, the time of year when many of us in New England are of the mind that winter has gone on long enough. As it happens, the skies are mercifully blue at the moment, rather than their usual dull gray for this time of year – always a happy thing for those of us who prefer to work with a clear view to the horizon. Given the recent, extended season of economic cloudiness, I will take it as a good omen.
As we begin this new year and decade in earnest, I have decided to embark on a new adventure in my career as a technologist and, since last year, independent consultant. In this it seems I have some good company. Many of my former colleagues, refugees from the financial services IT sector during the recent dust-up, have also embarked on new enterprises over the past year. Some have returned to school. Others have given up on the profession entirely, looking to find their future in less frenetic pursuits. And a few have literally gone “walkabout” to the nether reaches of Tierra del Fuego or to the banks of the Ganges. I have decided to set forth too, but on a different sort of quest, one of words and, I hope, solutions.
The adventure I have in mind is one in which the integrity of the journey itself and the truths it reveals are what matter most, one in which the destination is not foreordained. This blog will serve as the journal for those travels, a record of impressions, descriptions, and reckonings, offered up from time to time for all of you to read and comment upon.
My plan is simple, yet ambitious nonetheless: to seek out and investigate some of the more challenging questions that present themselves today within the ever-changing, always contentious world of “enterprise technology.” The term, as it’s commonly used, conjures up images of large, complex, corporate settings, places with a great diversity of computing platforms, of desktops, servers, and mainframes, of numerous, varied, and equally complex proprietary applications, places that require prodigious amounts of processing power, and where the processing typically takes place in vast, silently humming data centers. For the most part, this is exactly how the term will be applied here. It is also the context with which I am most familiar.
I should note that I have a more capacious definition of the concept in mind as well, one that encompasses enterprises of all sizes, conditions, and configurations. Whether the largest of corporate entities or institutional settings, or the smallest of individually-owned, web-based businesses, all can be considered “enterprises” of some sort. All attempt to employ people and produce something, whether of economic, social, or intellectual value. In the 21st century, all struggle to make sense of putting technology to the best use possible for their particular interests. There are, of course, vast differences in the scope and nature of the technologies used in these various enterprises, and oftentimes different lessons to be learned from each of them as well. Yet all share something fundamental in common, for it is no longer a question of “whether” human enterprises will actually leverage technology in significant ways going forward, but rather of “how” – regardless of their size or shape. The answer, or answers, to that question will have large implications for us all.
That said, my intention here is not to try to create a “blog for all technologists,” one in which any and all dimensions of the technology universe might be considered. Instead, my immediate interest is more narrow: I want to train my sights specifically on the integration of new and emerging technologies into existing infrastructures, environments, and organizational cultures. I want to consider both the promise and the seeming potential of those technologies, and also look at the sorts of IT management challenges that need to be addressed as part of the integration process. The stuff of “platform technology” in particular – that is, of the processors themselves, the operating systems, and the virtualization layers that provide the very foundation of our present-day and near-term computing capabilities – these will receive the lion’s share of the attention here.
At times, this focus may seem narrow indeed. On one occasion, for example, we might inquire into the question of how the arrival of Windows 7 now changes the way we look, or might look, at desktop management in the enterprise. On another, we might ask how Google’s entry onto the desktop application stage impacts our thinking about Microsoft’s long-standing place of preeminence in that sphere. By extension, on the mobile computing front, we might ask how Google’s recent incursion into the mobile handset and O/S marketplace potentially impacts enterprise strategies – still so wedded to the Blackberry framework. Similarly, we might look at how organizations should factor the much-anticipated Windows Mobile 7 into their plans, if at all. Or we might ask whether Microsoft is simply and forever an also-ran in this category. On the fast-changing virtualization front: is VMware now poised to take a position of market dominance relative to Citrix with regard to hosted/virtual desktops? As for the hypervisor itself: what exactly is the value proposition at this juncture for Microsoft’s Hyper-V relative to VMware’s ESX offering? Should organizations strive to run their data centers on a single hypervisor platform, or is this a place where heterogeneity makes more sense? And speaking of epic vendor competitions: is Apple truly ready to emerge as an enterprise player? Or is it already one by dint of the iPhone’s acceptance in the executive suite? Clearly, there is no shortage of subjects to engage our attention here.
Many of these questions will, of course, lead us to widen our lens further from time to time, and to consider some of the larger issues that currently preoccupy thoughtful technologists and their enterprises. With server virtualization now fully in the IT mainstream, for example, will rapid adoption of the “cloud” paradigm necessarily follow? Do we truly expect, as the Gartner Group recently declared, that one out of five businesses will hold absolutely no IT assets by the year 2012? If so, what does this mean for the purveyors of large, scale-up systems, like IBM and HP, that are so dominant in traditionally-run corporate data centers? And what about the specialty processors that predominate in many large enterprises, Power and Itanium (and SPARC, if indeed that is still on anyone’s strategic radar for the future)? Is the x86/64 platform, in the guise of Amazon and Google-style “cloud-based” server farms, on the verge of winning the processor wars, at long last? As well, what about operating systems? Will they become increasingly marginalized as the hypervisor becomes even more dominant on the virtualized platforms of the very-near future? Finally, what about “green tech”? What is the truth, really, about where green technology stands today, and what is its likely promise? What role should enterprise organizations play in its development and adoption, if any?
From all of this, it should be clear that my interest is not in exploring the bland or uninspiring landscapes that sometimes characterize the world of enterprise technology, but rather in coming to terms with its rockier shorelines, its deeper coves and underwater canyons, its windier straits and its icier passages.
I come to this effort having spent the better part of the last quarter century primarily engaged in the business application of technology. Over the course of those years, I have had the opportunity to labor both above and below the decks of the modern, technology-bound enterprise. In the going, I have had quite an education. Much of it has come from working and learning alongside many talented crews over the years, from IT operations and engineering to application support and enterprise architecture. Along the way, I have shared with these colleagues the techie pleasure of delving deeply into the “core” of platform and infrastructure technologies, and have likewise known the experience of being humbled, many times, by the complexities of that world. I have had the satisfaction of helping to make hard things come out right, at large enterprise scale, and of building technology organizations that succeeded in being both customer- and employee-focused. Whether sitting in the captain’s chair or working up in the ropes and the rigging, I have had the good fortune to be involved with organizations that were able to make smart decisions about technology integration, and I have also witnessed the kind of dysfunctional organizational dynamic that makes successful technology execution very close to impossible. I have tried to learn from those lessons especially.
One thing in particular that I have learned, again and again, is that organizations large and small alike are more often than not exceedingly challenged by the prospect of introducing change into their technology environments. Whether faced with something as seemingly mundane as replacing aging desktops or upgrading an end-of-life operating system, or by something far more daunting, such as moving to a virtualized application hosting model or implementing a new cloud-based data center, change in almost every form is both dreaded and yet also understood as a fact of life in the enterprise context.
It is easy to see why. Today’s enterprise organizations, as we all know, are completely intertwined with their technology infrastructure and attendant operations. This is undeniably our modern condition: most larger firms and institutions clearly could not function at all without the capabilities provided by their (largely) on-premise systems. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It is simply true. Furthermore, modern, distributed IT environments are the very picture of architectural complexity, which is not to be confused with architectural elegance. Most systems, no matter the specific type, have multiple dependencies. And when change, especially big change, is in the offing, the stakes are invariably high – as are the prospects for failure. Good planning is essential; flawless execution likewise. Success usually requires a broad range of skills – from effective business communication to solid technical understanding to strong project management capabilities. And it all has to happen nowadays under often highly-constrained budgetary circumstances.
Complexity and constraint – whether technical, architectural, process-oriented, or financial in nature – these themes are unmistakably hallmarks, truisms really, of today’s enterprise IT experience. When joined, as they always are, by the further complicating dynamic of organizational culture, the three together often produce a formidable combination for maintaining the status quo – no matter how badly in need of reform it might be. Getting things right in this context is understandably hard to do. Some organizations are obviously better at executing and managing change than others, but all are challenged just the same. For most, complexity begets further complexity, making it even harder to tease apart the tentacles of legacy systems, to simplify, reduce, and rationalize. This same complexity also drives our costs in exactly the wrong direction, making beggars of us all and further limiting our practical choices from year to year. Even worse, entrenched complexity encourages the rise of entrenched bureaucracies.
We all recognize the phenomenon: bastions of special technology interests assiduously build their fortifications, the mainframers in one corner of the kingdom (to pick just one of many possible culprits), and their RISC-ite cousins in the next, their shared goal simply being to defend their respective fiefdoms against anything that looks like substantive change. As part of what passes for “strategy,” they develop “intellectual” bulwarks of self-justification and rationalization, pseudo-scientific explanations for why their platform or approach is critical to nothing less than the very survival of the business itself. The arguments these agents offer up at times seem closer to ideology, if not religion, than they do to science. The result is what we now see in today’s enterprise data centers across the land: an astonishing array of diversity in our infrastructure, far too much capacity in some areas and far too little in others, too little flexibility for IT departments overall, excessive cost structures, the quashing of true creativity and innovation, and increasingly, the question of how much business value is actually being delivered for the dollars spent.
What is a responsible CIO to do? My response to that question is simply this: “embrace science; eschew religion.” Large enterprises today, at least in my experience, are fundamentally far more encumbered by the dead weight of the constrained, backward-looking, anti-scientific mindset just described, than they are by technology itself. The state of any given organization’s technology environment, whether vibrant or decrepit, is nothing more than a reflection of its people and culture. This blog, of course, cannot possibly address the totality of culturally-entrenched dysfunctions that exist in the world of enterprise IT. Instead, it seeks to do something far more modest but no less important: to promote an honest, extended conversation about how people and organizations can make better decisions about technology integration, choices that will help them move their computing infrastructures and environments forward. This, then, is the banner that this blog will carry, the mantra by which we will operate.
Imagine, for a moment, that we were to make our technology decisions “in the clear.” That is, imagine being able to make decisions free from undue influence, half-truths, answers already determined, and with the benefit of “real” data and analysis. It would indeed be remarkable. Some may think it unattainable in anything that looks like human culture. But the goal is surely a worthy one, and, I believe, achievable in good measure for those who truly do seek to attain real transformation in their IT organizations. Think of it as technology “gone straight,” no longer fooling itself or its patrons, liberated from its past lives and bad habits. Think of it as technology unbound. Enterprise technology unbound.
This blog seeks to help liberate IT decision-making, so that it is better informed all around, a function of honest analysis and assessment, rather than the exercise in predetermined futility that it so often is, and so that we can collectively have a better chance of making the difference we want and need to make.
It all sounds very ambitious, I know. Why bother, you might ask? It is because I believe that even among the din and cacophony of hucksterism, outright ignorance, special pleading and specious claims that constitute the conversation of the Internet today, there is, and hopefully always will be, room for voices that strive to be clear, fair, honest, and helpful.
My goal is to be one of those voices. I’ll start by asking what I think are the important (and perhaps obvious) questions in IT today regarding the integration of new technologies, architectures, and management approaches into our existing frameworks, structures, and organizational cultures. If we accept, for example, today’s widely-held premise that there is something truly worth considering in “the cloud,” then what are the best ways forward for a given enterprise on this subject? Does the “public cloud” make any sense at all for large enterprises? Are “private clouds” just another way of saying “proprietary, in-house” systems? What should we expect a “cloud O/S” to do for us? What about security in the cloud? In other words: let us take the things that matter in IT in the realm of new technology integration and interrogate them, with our goal being simply to get to the sort of “truth” that we are all striving for, but without the disintermediation of corporate or institutional culture, politics, and analyst/vendor self-interest.
Some may be unhappy with the characterizations and conclusions that result from this approach. I understand that, but maintain, even so, that the only thing that really matters here is how close we can get to something that seems to be the truth. Understanding that there is no such thing as perfection in human striving, I’ll nonetheless do my best, and stand corrected when that proves necessary too.
I come to this task as a true independent, a free agent now, beholden to no particular organization or master, paid by no secret corporate entities for my thoughts and opinions, and with no hidden agendas. If I am “selling” anything here, it is simply the notion I have just described: that all of us – whether individuals trying to make sense of technology in our personal lives, or employees working on behalf of large enterprise organizations – can make better-informed, fact-based technology decisions, and that new technology can be liberating rather than encumbering. Like most of you, I have to make a living too. I do that by consulting with individuals and enterprises alike on their technology needs and initiatives. And like everyone else, I need to turn to the same technology marketplace for the hardware and software components to supply my needs. Accordingly, I work every day with products developed and sold by such companies as Microsoft, Apple, HP, Cisco, VMware, Adobe, Red Hat, and beyond into the open source community. But none of those suppliers pays me to say what I say here, and none holds any undue influence over the recommendations I make – whether here or to a paying client. Independence alone, of course, guarantees nothing; the quality of my assessments and opinions will have to stand on their own. All of you will be the arbiters of whether I am successful in achieving my goal of providing useful, constructive perspectives and guidance.
For those who manage platforms and people in the enterprise technology context, this blog will, I hope, provide useful and perhaps provocative views on the opportunities inherent in the application of enterprise technologies today.
So, there it is. The sails are aloft. The journey is upon us.
You may expect reports back soon on our progress.
Thanks for reading,
Michael
