Comments on: Rethinking IT in the cloud computing era

By: William Louth

William Louth — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 09:19:19 +0000

From an “application-centricity” perspective IT mgmt has never tried to control anything but the people trying to construct and consume IT services. Actual control of the application itself has largely being ignored because it would require IT understanding how things actually work below the surface instead of coarse interaction boundaries.

Software services need control more than ever (lets give up trying to control humans) but that control needs to be adaptive and reflecting some policy or goal that aims to influence the behavior of the application which in turn changes how it (or at what rate) consumes infrastructure resources.

http://www.jinspired.com/research/adaptive-control-in-execution

IT mgmt as well as engineers need to view themselves as creators (as well as destroyers) of universes (infrastructure) and the organisms (applications) that inhabit them. IT mgmt needs to focus more on defining the boundaries, enviroment and resources within this world that influence behavior and adaptation of the software that is run within them. Then sit back and let it evolve and become more resilient as resource stocks are manipulated and new organisms (adaptations) are introduced. If that seems frightfully scaring then “they need to have a systems thinking”.

http://www.jinspired.com/site/introducing-signals-the-next-big-thing-in-application-management

By: Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 13:14:49 +0000

This conversation has been going on for a while now, but it is about to ramp significantly with the advent of integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). This is about moving nearly everything to the Cloud, including the develop and app management environments. For small to medium businesses, this is just common sense. For larger enterprises, though, it will take time for some fo the control to be pried from the fingers of people who’s entire career has been built in the old paradigm.

This isn’t technology disruption as much as individual disruption.

It will take time for the larger software and infrastructure vendors to put out offerings that in some ways cannibalize their current business. The smart ones will do it anyway because the alternative is to lose the market to the iPaaS vendors of the future. This is a different kind of ‘Kodak moment’ where digital photography has arrived but film is still doing just fine financially.

Agree with The Gnome on architecture, which will go through hybrid steps before embracing Cloud.

By: Mark Thiele

Mark Thiele — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 23:00:59 +0000

James, as usual a very well thought out and interesting take on the issue of modern organizations in the age of IT as a Service. I think the key message here is that we need to continue to focus more attention on the “why” versus the “what” or “how”. The reason many IT groups build monolithic infrastructure or new cloud environments is because they are solving the “how”, before they truly understand the “why”. While I agree that the developer focus is important, it’s really a customer focus that should drive how you design your IT organization and the associated technologies and partners that support it. The age old problem is still “how do we best deliver against business requirements?”, the difference is that we now have much greater choice and flexibility. However, that choice and flexibility can save you or get you in trouble, it’s all up the the IT group.

By: Roger Bottum

Roger Bottum — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 16:46:44 +0000

Right on with general sense, and you might mobile to the mix as well.

One piece that I believe bears more focus however is the role of IT in partnering to create innovation in systems and in product or service delivery. It’s all moving too fast and there are too many choices; someone needs to own constantly redefining the art of the possible to deliver better applications, transform business processes or create entirely new business lines. IT can play that role. IT can also add new value in areas like how to do usability. My non technology friends are actually interested now in big data and mobile and how they can apply. IT can be their partner.

On a tactical level IT can help the business avoid dead ends and unforeseen governance issues by providing appropriate standards and asking the right questions, while being seen as partners and not the department of no. Think about all the business people that ” self medicated” with Dropbox , not thinking through the requirements to collaborate at any scale or the governance issues of simple things like someone losing a device or leaving the company.

All in all, while scary, this is a great time to be in IT.

By: Kirk O'Connor

Kirk O'Connor — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:05:40 +0000

Nice post James. I like your line about IT becoming better at coordinating, consulting and enhancing while troubleshooting and allowing the enterprise to work faster and smarter on their own without limitations from the IT department.

How does the company troubleshoot issues that happen when applications interact with each other across operating entity or even development team boundaries?

To answer the above, a cohesive SLA with demarcation points must be coordinated and agreed upon with clear demarcation points.

By: Appeos

Appeos — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 09:05:24 +0000

Nice post and something I’ve been thinking about for some time. I’ve been doing more and more consulting gigs where clients have asked for system to allow them to build their business applications themselves, as they don’t want to go through the traditional IT development project pain.

I thought i was impossible at first, but after a couple of proof-of-concept projects, now I’m a believer. One billion-dollar insurance company I worked with wanted an empty “foundation” upon which they could get their business people to build the applications they wanted. After half a day of training they started work. I went back a few months later and they’d created several useful applications, including a full service insurance underwriting and claims management system with over a thousand screens. It was live than they were using it every day to handle hundreds of millions of dollars of business. Total IT time after my half-day of training? Zero. Scary stuff – the world is changing.

They built what they wanted and were using it, much quicker than they could have specified what they wanted in the traditional way, and saved millions of dollars in the process.

I’m working on a cloud-based version of these concepts (appeos.com) that can be used by any business person to build “line of business” applications themselves. This is the future.

By: GP

GP — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 03:15:43 +0000

Very relevant article for CIO’s and Business Executives looking to leverage cloud computing driven business services. The IT organization must transform into an “bizops” shop that is concerned with secure and cost-efficient business operations using tools like SaaS or IaaS. The use of the term “bizops” is a play on “devops” but seeks to shift the focus from IT to more on business needs driving the enterprise. Security, Management & Governance will become even more important as more and more control shifts. I have had an opportunity to participate in an interesting organizational transformation effort with a heavy use of various cloud computing services and implemented a concept called “Cloud Hub” – you can read more here
http://www.fedtechmagazine.com/article/2012/11/technology-blueprint-enterprise-future.

Clearly, we are in the early stages of cloud computing penetration and it will be interesting to watch how organizations adopt and adapt to take advantage of these new enablers.

By: ksankar

ksankar — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 21:32:50 +0000

James,
Good blog, as usual. Yep, infrastructure-centric IT is changing – “instead of running the servers, IT should focus on running the systems & services”. As you had mentioned many times, and we had discussed, IT should move from ops to devOps. the “Launch One more like this” is very deceptive – things like redundancy, resiliency and replication at the data layer, still need expertise more than that can be amassed by a menu click. Of course, SaaS takes care of these concerns. That brings another dimension to IT – SaaS whatever you can and develop the rest – which is still an IT job.
Cheers

By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 20:35:20 +0000

Agreed, great post.
I agree strongly with “The Gnome”. Many shops that I’ve seen, still continue to build very “monolithic” infrastructures that continue to require scaling more and more vertically to continue to facilitate their storage, processing power, and other resources requirements. Of course then they suffer larger costs to upgrade, risk a potential choke point of failure, lack of easy control to scale up and scale down systems/services in the event of a spike in traffic, data, “widgets”, whatever.
It really does seem like the limiting reagent here is the bean counters, managers, and sysadmins in the ditches almost equally. The bean counters don’t want to hear those massive purchases you may be making may not have been necessary. Managers don’t want to risk input from subordinates on major infrastructure changes. And most sysadmins that I’ve met seem to have issues thinking in the clouds and escaping the box. (Cute pun I thought).
$0.02 (USD)
cloud mentality doesn’t click with a lot of sysadmins and managers

By: The Gnome

The Gnome — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 19:34:13 +0000

The irrelevance of IT is always an interesting topic, and cloud is certainly a driving force. I think the article may focus too much on development needs, however. Many large businesses have departments and divisions deploying software packages with little development needs. IaaS and SaaS are just as important as PaaS. In fact, many companies have their own development within IT (though this too is changing). We are seeing the need to spin up a server infrastructure faster than even our internal IT department can even with its own virtualization efforts. A huge hurdle in all of this is also finance – cloud shifts from capital to expense, and not all IT departments or even business units are prepared for that. It is not just IT that needs to change and mature. A strong Enterprise Architect group is needed to help all parties get over these hurdles.