Chuck's Blog

New IT, New Roles, New Tools

The conversation ought to be familiar by now.  

Many IT organizations are taking a hard look at themselves, and are realizing they have to learn to compete for internal customers.  

To do so, they need to start looking more like a modern IT factory, and less like your father's IT shop.  

A successful transformation essentially boils down to organizing for success: reformulating many existing IT roles, and creating entirely new ones.

Transforming even a moderate-sized IT shop takes a unique brand of leadership.  The journey isn't quick or easy, but it does offer substantial rewards to all involved.  

And, to put it gently, in many cases your options to ignore or postpone the inevitable aren't all that appealing :)

New IT inevitably means new roles and new processes, which -- of course -- implies the need for newer tools that are oriented around creating easy-to-consume services vs. simply monitoring the underlying technical components.  For example, most VCE Vblocks are shipped with UIM as an "orchestral enabler" that can expose infrastructure and allow it to be consumed as a service.

But not all clouds are Vblocks, and not all IT environments can be managed using a single paradigm.

Into this transforming IT world, EMC will be launching IT Operations Intelligence v9 early next week.  

While the product has plenty to like on its own merits, I'd like you to consider this a preview of some of the bigger ideas finding their way into next-gen IT management tools -- both from EMC and others.

Change Is In The Air: CIO Magazine Poll Results

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know I've been writing extensively on IT transformation - where IT decides it needs to compete for internal IT business, and organizes appropriately.

Why?  It's a really big deal.  As a result, I've exhaustively gone through what I felt were the motivations and the challenges for IT changing the way it does business. 

But now, you don't have to listen to me and my endless exhortations.  You can now see how others in the IT profession feel about the topic.

While the poll results might be surprising to you, the only "surprise" I found was perhaps  the degree that the responses tended to correspond to my own personal views.  But that's not really a surprise, since many of my views are nothing more than aggregations of conversations that I frequently have with this audience.

Take a moment, and see for yourself …

It's The Big Launch Day For EMC IT's ITaaS

I consider it an article of faith that many enterprise IT organizations will need to learn to compete for their internal customers.

If you've been following this blog, you know I've been drawing heavily on the experiences of EMC's own IT organization as they progress through this inevitable transformation.

Today represents an interesting milestone of sorts: the formal internal launch of a "critical mass" of self-provisioned IT services that anyone at EMC can freely consume.  

Yes, they've had many of these internal services out there for a while, but now our EMC IT team has started to actively encourage consumption at scale.

I think this particular event serves as an excellent example of how the thinking changes when enterprise IT goes from being seen as a monopoly to being seen as an aggressive competitor.

If you work in an IT setting that's starting to go through some of these changes, I think you'll find the discussion here very enlightening.

EMC Atmos And The Challenge Of Doing Things Differently

There are two ways to bring a new technology to market.

One way is to give people a better product to do exactly what they're doing today: no process change required.

Another way is to give people a better way to do things: substantial process change required.

Meaningful breakthroughs in technology almost always involve process change.  The downside is that any substantive process change takes significant time and effort.  

There's no shortcut that I'm aware of.

In our world, EMC Atmos is an excellent example of innovative technology that demands both a mindset and process change.  The lessons we've learned about how to go about introducing new technology (and new process!) to large audiences is instructive -- not only to other technology companies like us, but to any IT organization looking to introduce new ways of doing things into their ranks.

As technologists, we obviously have to learn to get good at getting people to actually embrace what we come up with.  Otherwise, the stuff just sits on the shelf :)

EMC vLab: What Happens When You Point A Cloud At A Business Challenge

Clouds are exceptionally difficult to discuss in the abstract.  

They become much more real and tangible when you associate them with a particular business challenge.

As a result, I've started to collect various "cloud meets business" success stories.  They're all very cool, but they take some serious time to write up.

I thought I'd start with an internal one first: how EMC's vLab cloud is changing an important aspect of the way EMC does business.

Although there are aspects that are unique to EMC and our particular situation, I believe there are many useful lessons here that can be more broadly applied.

Why EMC Cares So Much About SAP

Today's news release is making the rounds here at EMC: SAP annointing the EMC/VMware combination as preferred partners for cloud.  A somewhat similar release was issued by our compatriots at VCE only a few days ago.

More than a few people here are extremely enthused; I tend to be a bit more reserved simply because it's only the latest signpost of a deep symbiotic corporate relationship that goes back for more than a decade.

That being said, it's also a fascinating industry case study of how one company (EMC) can -- over time -- wrap its entire value proposition around that of another company -- SAP.

Cloud And The Act Of Being Selfish

When people ask me "why do you blog?" I'm very clear -- I do it for me.  Yes, of course EMC benefits greatly, but I benefit as well.  

When I'm coaching aspiring bloggers, I make sure that they have their own self-serving interests clearly in focus, and no one else's.  

Five years, 1000+ posts and many millions of page views later, that ultimately selfish motivation has powered me through just about every distraction imaginable and helped to keep me focused.

It's an investment I continue to make in myself.

I believe that the rank and file of motivated career IT professionals now have an excellent opportunity being presented to them to make an equally selfish move -- to invest in the emerging new set of cloud skills and certifications that are now so much in demand.  

Yes, your employer will benefit greatly -- but so will you.

Organizing For Success

Maybe I'm getting more cynical as my career progresses.  I've found I can take a quick look at just about any org chart, and quickly figure out how well the team is doing -- or not -- as the case might be.  

Most of the time, I'm pretty accurate.

The corollary is also true: if you want to deliver different results than you have in the past, you're going to have to take a hard look at your organization: their mission, their structure, their skills -- their very DNA.  

That's what good leaders have to do to achieve results, I've found.

When it comes to IT transformation, the same is inevitably true -- an organization produces what it's organized to do.  

Organize around technology silos, and that's what you'll deliver.  Organize around large and complex projects, the same is true.  Ultimately, if you organize around delivering attractive and competitive IT services that your internal customers want to consume, and that's what you'll eventually deliver.  

And that's exactly the mission that so many IT leaders are facing.

As part of our recent EMC IT Leadership Council, Jon Peirce delivered his experiences in leading just such an IT transformation.  Jon, as you might remember, is the key actor in many previous popular posts, such as "From Silos To Services".  During this presentation, Jon laid out the key concepts and insights better than I've ever seen him do.

If you're an IT leader, or aspire to be one, you'll likely want to invest the time in reading this very lengthy and detailed post.

Leading An IT Transformation

Leading a transformational change in any large organization is not for the faint of heart.  

Even more so when the subject of said transformation is a large, entrenched IT organization delivering mission-critical services.  But that is exactly the situation so many IT leaders find themselves in these days.

At our recent IT Leadership council, Sanjay Mirchandani opened with an extended keynote detailing EMC's IT transformation: the "why", the "how" and the outcomes.  

This post is part of an extended sequence recapping all the excellent content at the event.  The back story and overview can be found here.

Why do I find this presentation particularly interesting?  

There are undoubtedly IT organizations out there that are arguably "better" than EMC's own IT.  And I know for a fact that there is a large population of IT organizations that are still running in a tradtional legacy mode and have yet to begin their journey.

What's fascinating to me about this story is the change: how a large IT organization went from one kind of IT organization to another.

Yes, EMC IT supports a large, global technology company, i.e. EMC itself.  And, yes, our situation and experiences might not be an exact match to your situation and experiences.

But, as I've shared the story over and over again, there is plenty to learn for many IT leaders who are looking for clear (and successful!) examples on how a large IT organization can fundamentally change how it does business.

The Dark Side Of Clouds

In my travels, I'm starting to see a disturbing trend.  I don't like it one bit.

The setup is easy.  Business is demanding more from IT.  IT wants to respond by being able to deliver cloud-like services internally.  A group of smart people assemble to try and tackle the challenge.

And then it all goes horribly, horribly wrong.  

The assembled team decides to invest many months and piles of money to go hand-craft their own "cloud" out of commodity components.  Their management team, for whatever reason, allows them to go do it.  Based on experiences so far, almost no one seems to be able to reach the finish line with a satisfactory result.

The first time I saw this at a large financial institution, I thought it was an anomoly.  I've now seen this for the 7th or 8th time, so there's a pattern forming.  And it's grim.

I've been giving some serious thought as to why some IT groups decide to go down this particular road, and others take a more pragmatic route. 

And, to be honest, it's not a pretty picture.