My World and Welcome To It

A Blog for Shirey Consulting Services – Views and Thoughts About Just About Everything

Archive for April, 2012

Another Cloud Blog Post

Apr 11

Posted by dshirey in Cloud, System i | Comments off

Everywhere I look I see that people are supposedly turning to the cloud, to bundled hardware and software services with a fixed fee price as a way to cut costs.  Please, color me skeptical.

I know there are a lot of advantages, for some shops, to cloud computing, but what I wonder about is the gut rationale for the rush to cloud computing that we see today.  Everything that we do as human beings, of course, comes from some sort of gut reaction. Cost, for example, is certainly a gut reaction, but I can’t buy the adage that cloud computing is going to save us boatloads of cash. That just doesn’t seem reasonable.  After all,Shirey’s First Law tells us that costs never really decrease, they just change category and become harder to categorize.  So what is really driving the drive to cloud computing?

One of the key factors that drives people today is fear and the desire to avoid anything that might go wrong for which we could be blamed. That and avoiding any upfront cost.  I really believe that most IT and business decisions can be explained using those to gut reactions.  Simple fact is that I don’t want to be blamed for anything, however oblique.  Doesn’t really matter what the monthly charge is as long as there is no upfront cost. And cloud computing satisfies both of those primal needs; if something does go wrong it’s really not your fault, it’s the provider, and they pay people to spin it OK so no problem.  And there is no upfront cost, just a monthly charge and you can always make the numbers come out right.

Now, I’m not saying that cloud computing is bad. It is definitely worth looking at and is the solution of choice for many shops that are, shall we say, ‘talent poor’. But is it the way everyone should go, is it a rational way to structure every department because solid business benefits will accrue – or is it a reaction to primal forces that have nothing to do with IT?

What do you think?  Are people, including CIO’s, rational or gut?

 

IT Strategy – Pro-Active Strategic Design

Apr 5

Posted by dshirey in System i | Comments off

Today, many IT shops have two characteristics in common.

First, they tend to be reactionary; waiting until a problem occurs and they are contacted by an outside group (sales, manufacturing, finance, etc.) before getting  involved in a situation.

And second, many IT shops have come to define themselves as overseers of the programs and infrastructure, rather than as guardians of the business system.  The mental wall has been erected around the program libraries and hardware and our interest doesn’t range as far a field as it use to.

Part of the reason for this is that most shops are under-staffed, at least as compared to the olden days, and there’s just not as much muscle to go around looking for trouble.  Another part of the reason is that we, for the most part, do not have pure analysts anymore, people whose job it was to live like a user and look for opportunities for system growth or improvement.  Instead, what we pretty much have are programmers who have an extensive knowledge of the user situation but whose main orientation is still firmly grounded in IT.  That sounds like a small, insignificant difference, but it is anything but small and far more than insignificant.

The end result is that many IT departments get looked at as a service unit, providing services to other, more forward thinking groups, rather than as the business system leader for information.  And once you are seen as a service, rather than a strategic leader, then you are in jeopardy because anyone can provide a service.  Strategic leaders are much harder to swap in and out.

The real question, of course, is how do you break out of that?  How do you make your shop a strategic leader.

 

Seize the Initiative 

The key is to seize the initiative by focusing on the business, not the IT structure.

There are a number of ways you can do this but my favorite (at least at the moment) is to look for the points of failure or the stress points in your business.  Look at your business (or one segment of it; manufacturing, engineering, finance, order shipment, etc.) and define exactly what the stress points are.  Another way to look at this is to find everything that is hard to do in the system or where a failure in that process (manual or computer) would cause problems that could not be trivially resolved.

This is a process that you would undertake in concert with the users and it shows you to be both proactive and supportive.  You are looking for ‘their pain’.  It is not the same as building a wish list although there may be some overlap.  It is looking for the weak spots in your business.

This is also a process that needs to be carried out by someone with an analyst’s mind set which is quite different from a programmer’s.  Yes, the person who does it might also code, they may even be your chief coder, but then again, they might not.

An analyst generally tends to think a little broader.  They are not looking for a solution to a single particular problem, but rather a systems approach to an area that will be flexible over time and which will work well with other areas.  There’s a lot of thinking that goes on and that may equate to no visible action.  But it produces a design that will accommodate a great deal of growth in it as the business moves and changes in the future.

A programmer, on the other hand, can talk to users, and often has a good understanding of what they want, but their first interest is in getting back to their desk so they can start coding something.  This is not conducive to producing a flexible design that can grow with the business.

 

End Result?

Pro-Active Strategic Design plops the IT group right in the middle of any strategic planning that goes on.  It results in a design that is broad and flexible, that can be broken down into bite sized coding projects that can then be given to the people who just want to program.  It also puts the IT group more firmly in the drivers seat for new development and limits the number of times that someone somewhere will see something in a magazine and start insisting that they need the same thing.

PASD  is something that everyone should be doing.  Yes, your resources may be limited but hunkering down and reacting as best as you can to what comes at you is the last thing you do before you are overwhelmed.  You would be surprised at how effective even a little offense is as a defense.

For more information on how PASD can help you, contact SCS at support@shireyllc.com