IT Management 2.0: New Answers to New Questions
Today, most IT leaders have a relatively clear idea about what they must grow up to become—highly responsive, agile and lean service providers. Of course, they’ve known this for some time—only now, the transformation seems more imminent than ever.
It’s the combination of necessity and invention that has made this so: necessity, in the form of changing economics and market realities, and invention, in the form of new tools.
For most, the necessity part is clear as day—painfully so. But the tools? The tools remain cloudy—in many cases, literally.
In part, we have ourselves to blame for this rampant “cloud washing” that has swept across the vendor landscape over the last year or two. (Although, I’m quite proud of rPath’s discipline on this front. Certainly, cloud is an amplifier to our value, but we’ve consciously avoided being labeled “a cloud company” in the service of clarity and focus.)
As a vendor contributing to this ecosystem and the emerging generation of system management solutions, this confusion has been burdensome. We’re often relegated to an amorphous catchall category associated with virtualization, cloud or some such thing.
But that seems to be changing. Category definitions are evolving to reflect the new generation of management tools—new answers to new questions.
Forrester recently published a report that bid farewell to yesterday’s IT management taxonomies in favor of a new model for describing the IT management tool chain—what they’re calling IT Management 2.0. It’s a welcomed and I think necessary refresh in the context for the IT management conversation. I hope it will spur others to do the same.
At the same time, DevOps has emerged as a movement more inclined to look forward than back. The focus is on the automation requirements for lean, high-velocity IT.
Some of the large management vendors continue to fan these winds of change, signaling strong agreement through aggressive acquisition and realignment (think CA and VMware). Others are standing by more idly (examples withheld for propriety’s sake; that’s just how I was raised. But you know who they are).
The reality is that yesterday’s approaches to IT management are fast becoming anachronistic relics, yesterday’s answers to today’s very different questions.
Today, IT is under extraordinary pressure to transform because of:
• Massive scale—driven, in part, by the emergence of virtualization and cloud, through which the volume of deployed systems may compound by 5-20X or more.
• Accelerated change—amplified by Agile development and the growth in complexity of systems comprising many different custom and commercial software sources.
• The need for speed—a persistent pressure for IT, but made worse by the just-swipe-a-credit-card promises of Amazon EC2 and other public cloud options.
• Lean IT—as budgets contract under the weight of do-more-with-less mandates and last year’s lean-by-necessity becomes this year’s “new normal.”
In The 6 Musts of Intelligent System Automation, I propose three phases to the evolution of IT, which I compare—perhaps ambitiously—to the evolution of mankind.
“The Stone Age,” I suggest, was a time of largely manual IT management practices, where scale was countered by adding headcount. It was a time of blunt instruments and brute force. It was followed by “The Age of Enlightenment,” which was an early foray into automation—when previously manual tasks were automated with scripts, but little was done to improve the processes themselves. It was a step in the right direction—but it, too, reached its frontier. Finally, I present “The Industrial Revolution” as an analogy for the present day transformation in IT. This is IT Management 2.0 (or is it 3.0?).
From my perspective, IT Management 2.0 is:
• Application-centric—where focus shifts from infrastructure- to application-centric and IT is able to reorient to what really matters—applications and business services.
• Model-driven—where policy dictates what systems should look like and a manifest describes what they actually look like, ensuring consistency and conflict-free change.
• Version-controlled—where the entire lifecycle of a system, polices and configurations are easily promoted, rolled back and reproduced at any point in time.
• Self-service—where IT defines policies, delegating creation and management of business services by way of service catalogs and other abstracted front ends.
• Elastic—where capacity and services can be easily scaled up and down as demand waxes and wanes and business circumstances dictate.
• Lean—where services-intensive, cumbersome commercial solutions are replaced with lighter-weight solutions with low cost of ownership and fast time to value.
• Open—where closed and monolithic is traded for open and interoperable, and IT is set free to easily embrace new innovation–and better options–without the risk of vendor lock in.
In the end, it means massive leverage on human capital, rapid response to business requirements, seamless and reversible change, and a secure option to move between tools and environments as circumstances dictate.
But that’s my view. What does IT Management 2.0 mean to you?
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