IT Needs to Innovate or Consumerize

A recent article by Larry Dignan about how IT has fallen behind the Tech Curve laments how slow and cumbersome enterprise IT has become relative to consumerized technologies. Larry covered a session at the recent Gartner Symposium and was advised by Gartner analysts that IT pros want the world to proceed in an orderly fashion and are weighed down by the legacy of previous choices. That’s a fair statement.

Gartner’s solution, or at least that posed by analysts David Mitchell Smith and Tom Austin is for IT to simply let users buy their own gear:

Now Gartner has been on this user-provided IT pitch for a while now-the research firm equates the company laptop to the company car in the 1970s-and the prediction hasn’t exactly become the norm. However, the move to let employees bring their own gear increasingly makes sense. Why? Employees are already bringing what they want to work anyway. Exhibit A: The iPhone. Exhibit B: Google. Exhibit C: Facebook. You get the idea.

Larry Dignan – How Did IT Fall, Tech Republic, October 2009

This notion – to simply let users make their own consumerized choices as a cure to the “crotchety” world of IT - misses the core of the problem; that is, the lack of the necessary network automation, integration and real-time visibility. IT won’t keep up unless the culture of manual labor, scripts and spreadsheets changes.

The “consumerize or fail” strategy is also fraught with risk to enterprise-centric market caps and IT careers. I think it is more likely for creeping consumerization to force enterprise IT shops into another wave of network solution investments that enable consumer equivalent automation and control.

While Cisco (CSCO), VMware (VMW), F5 (FFIV) and others have taken the lead in articulating the need for network evolution, IBM earlier joined the conversation with a “dynamic infrastructure” campaign which also included a Juniper (JNPR) partnership.

Gartner may call it real time infrastructure, others call it infrastructure 2.0 or dynamic infrastructure; but the point is that today’s network infrastructure is expensive to manage, error-prone and inflexible. That is the core of the gap between IT order and the fluid world of consumer tech innovation.

Virtualization brought flexibility to within the VLAN, but for the most it stays confined there thanks to the messy collision between static networks and dynamic systems and increasingly dense VLANs. It was enterprise IT’s first opportunity to catch up yet the network wasn’t ready or engaged.

For example, in some environments it costs almost as much to move a server as it does to buy a new one. That was one of the drivers of virtualization-lite, immediate capex reduction by allowing systems teams to manage, move spin up, etc new servers in minutes and at a fraction of the cost.

Yet that capex bonanza comes with an opex component: higher rates of change and increased density within ever-increasing populations of VLANs ends up creating more complexity (think more pre-automation opex). Now according to Nemertes research, virtualization drivers are shifting to flexibility (versus capex).

Virtualization only postponed the reckoning by enabling admins to manage more server pool within VLANs. The old world challenges still wait at the border of the VLAN. And that where be where new fortunes are made or lost, depending upon how vendors and IT departments invest in coming years.

If enterprise IT is re-architected then consumerization at worst is only a cultural threat. If it remains a bastion of manual labor consumerization may be just one more albatross to be acknowledged at yet another industry conference.

Rather than merely accepting the consumerization of enterprise IT or the “eventuality” of public clouds, why not focus much needed attention back at the network, which was once and should perhaps again be the driving force for IT and business innovation?

Disclosure: Long EMC (which holds VMW). I am a senior director at Infoblox.

Comments

[BeachRider:]

Certainly there are end-user and datacenter-centric components to increasing the flexibility of Network IT. The author tries to draw both together in this discussion, but he also shows that they are driven by totally-separate forces.

IT constrains the user because users otherwise cause problems for one-another. In my shop, some users were putting in their own Best-Buy wireless routers in an attempt to remedy an immediate need. The Routers slow down to the slowest current-user device so high-speed connections were sporatic. The user would also not-be-able to move from one Router to another unless infrastucture was robust enough to deal with that.

OTOH, overly conservative IT practices constrain legitimate user-visible improvements. If Gigabit switches (or 10Gb uplinks to core switches) are needed for a small fragment of users, IT needs to find a way to present those capabilities, at acceptable cost. Too many times, users perceive that their needs are diluted to meet the needs of a non-associated groups in their proximity.

Oct 23 11:23 AM

[Gregory Ness:]

BeachRider:

Great comment and input. Thank you.

Greg

Oct 23 04:26 PM

[danf:]

IT seems to see their purpose as being the imposition of "process" on the hapless "users".

"process" means the responsibility for providing services are transferred to "teams" - usually located thousands of miles away and with careful structuring of communications channels so that the people with problems can never, ever call the "service" providers directly.

The strategic function of IT is to constrain expense by frustrating, sidetracking and preventing "users" from using IT services beyond what IT "teams" are prepared to provide.

This explains the attractiveness of SaaS, ASP and cloud solutions as what all the "users" hear is the possibility that they can bypass, ignore, avoid, escape the IT stranglehold.

One is reminded that the German Army in the early days of WW2 crushed their enemies with fewer armored vehicles or inferior technical qualities because they reorganized their fighting forces around the new technology whereas france and england simply added armor to traditional infantry formations.

Sadly IT has taken the same route as france and england. Of course it's probably not the fault of IT, but rather their management by checkbox masters and their own "loyalty" to their profession rather than to the businesses they have joined.

Full Disclosures - the above is all based on personal experience

Oct 24 08:54 PM

[Gregory Ness:]

Dan:

Great points. Now if today's CIO can see the power of mobility/flexibility and the network as the critical enabler they could avoid the Maginot effect (over investment in legacy architectures).

Thx
Greg

Oct 27 10:24 PM