A Transformation of Necessity: The Post-Recessionary Imperatives for IT
It’s interesting to watch the themes emerging from this year’s IT conferences—clearly, there’s a transformation underway and it’s happening fast.
That’s because it’s a transformation of necessity.
During today’s opening keynote address at Forrester’s IT Infrastructure and Operations Forum, automation analyst Glenn O’Donnell laid down the post-recession imperatives for enterprise IT. His point? Traumatic macro events forever transform the status quo. To wit: Last year’s Great Recession was the catalyst for the fundamental transformation in IT taking place today.
Glenn told what he called a “love story”—a love triangle, really—involving three people:
First, Ian: The IT ops director, beholden to traditional goals of stability and control.
Next, Eric: The business guy with fire, ambition and urgency to get it done, now.
It was a typical dysfunctional relationship between business lines and IT: conflicted and tenuous, if not outright hostile. But it wasn’t an issue of right or wrong; they just had very different goals and motivations. They were incompatible.
Then comes Yuri, the maverick developer—”the artist”—willing to bend rules and do what it takes to make it happen for Eric. Yuri was Eric’s answer.
Needless to say, Yuri and Eric did an end-run around Ian—in the interest of speed.
Incidentally, this same dynamic is why, according to cloud analyst James Staten, enterprise IT and application development report dramatically different rates of cloud adoption: 5% and 24%, respectively. Both figures are probably accurate. Dev is simply following the path of least resistance to satisfy the needs (and speed) of business.
This is all by way of saying that IT is being forced to change—to transform.
If you ask Glenn, he’ll tell you that three things need to happen for IT to transform:
• “Strategic Rightsourcing”—IT must get out from under the weight of commodity infrastructure and processes. If it isn’t core or differentiating, automate it or outsource it!
• “Industrialize Infrastructure and Operations”—”Fast and flawed and you fail. Prompt and precise and you prevail.” This poetic alliteration is Glenn’s way of saying that IT must deeply engineer and automate IT systems. You can’t effectively automate what isn’t controlled and consistent. (We couldn’t agree more!)
• Adopt Agile methods—extending these principles into the operational context, allowing development to move fast—and change—on behalf of business lines.
While there are several transformations taking place in IT today, the more you look at them, the more they look like one. Cloud, virtualization, lean IT, DevOps—they’re all converging on the same goals (speed, efficiency and cost control) and by the same means (removing the dev/ops bottleneck, consolidating, outsourcing and automating).
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