Is your IT institution clean?

Is your IT institution clean?

If technology adoption is akin to a surgical procedure, then would you let everyone pitch in with their scalpel?  Probably not, writes Dwayne Melancon from Tripwire, in “The little things will kill you”.

Dwayne’s excellent post highlights some poor hygiene practices and provides a nice framework on what to do.  I see this every week when talking to customers about future data centers with Cisco UCS and VMware ESX4.

Customers adopt technology to solve some  business issue: either to save money, or make money, or both.  Technology adoption for technology (hobby) sake is a recipe for disaster.

But adopting technology, even with a convincing business case, is not easy and this has zip, zero, nada to do with the technology itself and everything to do with the people and process of the organization that is doing the adopting.

I call IT organizations “institutions of people, process and technology” and to adopt a new technology like Cisco UCS you have to “institutionalize” that technology, which means integrating it into the people and process.  But this institutionalization has a quantum effect: much like “the act of observing a quantum particle changes its state”, then you will find the process of institutionalizing a new technology will change the institution.

Unfortunately, this normally happens the hard way.  It’s rare to find a technology adoption project where the institutionalization parts are explicitly listed in project asks.  The technology goes live, the operations don’t work, and everyone is on the back foot burning thousands of unplanned man hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the solution operable.  I work for a vendor so I’m acutely conscious of this because it hurts my goal of helping customers be successful and reach their goal (30% ROI in 12 months, for example), so I’m doing something about this at Cisco.

The hygiene practices that Dwayne listed are areas that I focus on at Cisco through our service engagement called VOMA (Virtual Operations Management Assessment).  What’s unique about VOMA is that we talk about institutionalization of technology across six dimensions:

  1. Management Processes
  2. Organization
  3. Governance
  4. Technology
  5. People
  6. Metrics

If you memorize those six dimensions and then read Dwayne’s post again, you’ll realize that he’s actually talking about those six dimensions:

  • Misconfigured stuff = management process
  • Too many surgeons = organization
  • Expectations = governance
  • People following the rules = people
  • Risk = technology
  • View = metrics

If you are interested in Cisco UCS and ESX4 as the “next big thing”, rest assured that we vendors care about how you, the customer, will institutionalize these technologies: identifying the barriers and overcoming them is the secret sauce to delivering that Future Data Center vision.

If you have poor IT hygiene you will either fail to institutionalize the technology or it will be so painful to negate all the benefits you originally planned for.  So when you look at the project plan for that new technology solution, ask yourself: “Where are the tasks to institutionalize this technology?”

Related posts:

  1. ITIL is about Technology Adoption
  2. Making ITIL real: Change Management for Technology Adoption
  3. Six dimensions of institutionalizing the Cisco Unified Computing System
  4. Technology meets Service Management
  5. Unified Computing = Unified People, Process and Technology