IT Agility, what on earth that means and what the CTO of VMWare thought.

Some of us attend various conferences and I had the opportunity to get to a couple recently – the Gartner Symposium and Educause (https://www.educause.edu/).  There was lots of good stuff and my intention is to cover a few topics in our newsletters going forward.  Hopefully, we can stimulate a bit of positive debate and discussion.  In part, what we learn at these conferences will help make our new 2015/16 strategic plan as good as it can be - incidentally, this is due by the end of December 2014.  So, we need to get cracking.

We also need to update our current three year IT strategy to take into account our new corporate plan fairly soon.  Our new strategy needs to be cognisant of any technology advances or anything else on our 'landscape' that might have changed.

So, first up on the topic list is IT agility.

How can we cultivate IT agility? In other words, how can we respond quickly to customer demand without getting stuck in bureaucratic treacle?  Or being hamstrung by an overflowing and demanding project portfolio? But, it's a bit more than that.  How can we get ahead of the game and be a supportive and positive partner to our University?  Our knowledge and expertise ought to put us in a great place to understand how technology can be leveraged to push us (our University) collectively forward.  So, what's stopping us?  Is anything stopping us?

Well, I attended an interesting presentation by Paul Strong, Chief Technology Officer at VMWare.  I also managed to speak to Paul after his Gartner presentation.  While he didn't address the whole IT agility question, he did address a small part - which mostly revolves around IT process automation.  And, it did contain a call to action for central / enterprise IT - that's us by the way.  For those of you who don't know - and apologies to those who do - VMWare is the virtualisation technology underpinning most of what hums and creaks in our data centres adeptly managed and soothed by Rob Spalding and his team.

So, what did Paul have to say?  Paul reckons we’ve got it a bit wrong over the last 30 years.  Concentrating on infrastructure and ‘spinning rust’* rather than ‘Innovation Technology’ – as he says IT should really represent.  (*IT infrastructure joke for spinning magnetic disk.  No, it doesn't get any better in infrastructure comedy land)

What does he mean by this?  Organisations typically use the application lifecycle – with an operational process framework to help.  The framework we use, of course, is ITIL and Joe McIntyre and his team have put a lot of time into its adoption - with some of us getting certified to different levels.

ITIL is a common approach for operational management of services and provides the necessary processes to run our IT service.  We all have supporting tools such as a service desk system - we use Supportworks.  Almost everyone uses ITIL in some form.  So far, so good.  But, ITIL and other frameworks obfuscate and get in the way of agility.  People in these processes often act as gatekeepers – preventing change.  Security specialists are often particularly obstructive to speedy adoption of anything new.  Sorry guys - this isn't to say security and processes aren't necessary.  Far from it. But…this is not necessarily the way to agility.   As with everything, it's a balance Paul argues - we probably all agree.

Paul suggests that organisations have too many applications and therefore complexity.  This is the primary reason why IT has not brought the expected economies of scale and actually holds back innovation.  It’s far too complicated.  We’re far too busy managing too much technical complexity to have much time to think innovative thoughts.  Cloud providers are much better at this.  Why should this be the case?  Cloud providers only provide a small number of architectural blueprints that they refine and run efficiently.  With fewer blueprints, you can automate like crazy and economies of scale are possible.  It’s all about simplification.

How do we get better at this?  Standardise, standardise, standardise.  Not a great mystery.  The complexity is not about the number of servers*; it’s the number of server variants.  *Insert any technology for server.  This is one of the primary principles we use when looking at technical architectures at our IT Architecture Board.  But, the emphasis on a limited number of simple technical choices perhaps needs to be greater.  Compromise functionality to gain greater simplicity.  I do agree, and it’s hard to argue really, that we need to simplify.  Action point for us here is to think harder about how we can do this successfully.

I asked Paul afterwards about the “we’ve got it a bit wrong for the last 30 years” suggestion.  The main issue I had with his presentation was probably that it was pretty infrastructure-centric.  I guess that’s what you might expect from an infrastructure vendor – but, did he really believe the biggest thing around IT agility was about automation?  Turns out his opinion is a bit more nuanced.  Yes, VMWare (and other virtualisation technology) could help us to automate – once we simplify first.  But, yes, all the other stuff around Enterprise Service Buses, Service Orientated Architecture and much more besides is pretty important too.

So, as I said before, the key action point here is about introducing simplicity wherever we can.  It’s fine to appropriately compromise on functionality.  A second key action is to look at the specifics of our server automation – which might include automatic provisioning of servers for our production environment but for development and test too.

More here:

http://gregoredu.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/gartner-2014-how-does-vmware-cto-paul.html

Gregor Waddell, Assistant Director