How to shop wisely for the IT department of the future

A head for business

Jonathan Frappier; echoes Burns and Harris. A sysadmin who has mostly worked with SMEs and startups, he is also immersed in the world of big IT through the customers his employers support.

He agrees with what analysts and business moguls have said for decades. "IT leadership needs to be more involved in the business and not in the typical cost centre that IT is thought to be,” he says.

“IT isn't often involved in strategy meetings. The more it is involved in those, the easier it will be to associate hybrid cloud with business drivers, versus just being thought of as cheaper computing. It is not."

Frappier's personal experience mirrors my own, and I think will resonate with many readers. All too often departments other than the IT team make the decisions about what kit gets bought, with operations stuck holding the bag and being told simply to "make it work".

Frappier, digging into memories of previous organizations he's supported, says: ”The development teams have so much priority over operations that we are not even invited to those discussions. Development determines priorities and we are left making decisions about what to do.

"The decision makers overspend on IT infrastructure because their perception of what is possible is out of date. It does not take advantage of modern capabilities. IT operations need to be included in the decision-making process.”

Like Harris, Frappier views a cultural shift within organisations as necessary, and he has seen it provide real-world benefits for organisations he has worked with.

"The movement towards DevOps probably helps, even if all it does is take the stigma of old-school IT out of the business. A different corporate culture has resulted in fewer people duplicating efforts,” he says.

Human failings

Over the years I have talked to hundreds of other systems administrators, CIOs, and venture capitalists about what holds IT back from realising the efficiencies the marketing claims tell you about.

I get products into my lab with features that make me say “wow!", only to find it miserably difficult to find examples of those features actually being used in the field.

The problem isn't the tech, it's the people. Pettiness, jealousy, fear, laziness – any number of things can lead to the defence of personal empires at the expense of corporate efficiency.

It is this corporate containerisation that makes realising the maximal return from our IT spend difficult, if not impossible.

For all the promise of dynamic infrastructure, private clouds, software-defined networking and so forth, none of it amounts to a hill of beans if any attempt at strategic planning is sabotaged from the inside.

Public cloud computing is not a cure-all either. Public cloud computing removes the strategic thinking about infrastructure from the company's plate, but old challenges remain.

Unless and until vendors can make IT decision making push-button simple, inefficiency will exist even in the public cloud.

Perhaps the only way to achieve maximum efficiency is to create a company with no people in it. That is a pretty bleak prospect for people, however, and I think we can learn to adapt our thinking to find an acceptable middle ground.

What say you? Answer in the comments, please. ®