IT Strategy

CIO Strategy / Get Better / IT Strategy — Comments Off
11
Dec 15

Data Center Knowledge – Forget Hardware, Forget Software, Forget the Infrastructure

Enterprise IT has to forget about hardware, forget about the infrastructure, forget about software, and think more about getting their job done, which is delivering services or applications.

That’s according to David Cappuccio, a VP at Gartner who oversees research in enterprise data center strategies and trends. In the opening keynote at Gartner’s annual data center management summit here Monday, Cappuccio together with colleague Thomas Bittman outlined Gartner’s vision for the new role the IT organization has to play in the enterprise.

That new role has less to do with managing disparate bits of infrastructure and more to do with selecting the best infrastructure strategy to provide a specific service. The toolbox they can select from includes on-premise or colocation data centers and cloud – private, public, or hybrid, on-prem or outsourced.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Yevgeny Sverdlik

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / IT Strategy / Uncategorized — Comments Off
10
Dec 15

IT Business Edge – IT’s Role in an Automated, Software-Driven Enterprise

“Forget about hardware, forget about software, forget about infrastructure in general and start thinking about achieving key tasks that help your business grow.”

It’s been said that in the near future the enterprise won’t need to worry about hardware – data productivity will be driven by software-defined architectures sitting atop dumb, commodity boxes.

It’s also been said that before too long the enterprise won’t have to worry about architectures or middleware either – just push everything into the cloud and let someone else deal with service provisioning.

And now we have knowledge workers accessing enterprise resources through their own preferred client devices, easing up on the requirement to supply everyone with a PC.

So if these trends continue, what exactly will the enterprise be responsible for when all is said and done?

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

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08
Dec 15

HBR – Executives Get the IT They Deserve

Here’s a concise article on why enterprise IT is so different from consumer IT. Business leaders, what’s your next move?

Many executives pine for their internal IT systems to give them a more consumer-friendly experience. They point to the simplicity, ease of use, and hassle-free nature of the digital services they use in their personal lives: the apps on their smart phone that make services available at the push of a button, software that can be installed and configured with the click of an icon, the ability to plug a printer into a laptop’s USB port and have it ready to print, a tablet that can be connected to the internet without any cautionary pop-ups warning about potential security risks or possible compatibility problems.

In the consumer IT world everything just seems to work, they lament. Why does corporate IT make things so complicated?

Unfortunately, most executives don’t recognize that consumer IT and enterprise IT are different animals. They don’t understand that they must play the pivotal role in the critical decisions that shape enterprise IT — decisions that they leave to the likes of Yahoo, Apple, Google, and Vodafone in the consumer world.

In the consumer world, all digital services are vanilla versions. Sometimes, you can opt for either cheaper or more expensive versions with less or more functionality. But as a customer, you have no input into what is offered; you either take it or leave it.

More of the Harvard Business Review post from Joe Peppard

IT Strategy — Comments Off
02
Jun 14

CIO.com – How to Save the Daily Standup Meeting

Years ago, in the bad old days, you had the weekly status meeting. You’d wait for your turn to talk about your status to the project manager; when other people talked, you’d either tune out to think about what you were going to say or, possibly, tune out entirely and think about that upcoming skiing trip.

All that changed with scrum and the daily standup. It was a breath of fresh air.

But something happened with the daily standup in many organizations. As its focus changed, people were driven to prepare a list of what they were working on and to focus on it.

I woke up one morning and realized that, at a current client, we were still doing those painful, low-value weekly status meetings. The only difference: Now we were doing them every day.

If you’ve experienced this, take heart. You’re not alone. More importantly, the daily standup can be fixed. This article explains how.

Answer Me These Questions
First, let’s look at the famous Three Questions of Scrum:
What did you do yesterday?
What will you do today?
Are there any impediments in your way?

More of the CIO.com article

IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
16
May 14

VentureBeat – Agile in the enterprise: To succeed, avoid the fundamentalists

I remember it as though it were just months ago, but it was early 2005 when a heated discussion rippled across our company. A new way to develop software had matured and had been growing fast since 2001: the agile software development approach. We knew that it would disrupt the very controlled way CI&T had been developing custom software for big companies for over 6 years, and that was scary.

Until then, we were exclusively implementing a formal process called RUP (rational unified process), a successful implementation of the ideas from the unified process framework. In our pitch we were purposely fighting the waterfall method that had been eroding the reputation of software houses over time. Studies were consistently showing that more than 65 percent of big software projects would fail.

Today, it comes without a single sign of pain to say that 100 percent of our projects are carried out using agile, but during that time we were uncertain about the future. That pristine CMMI level 5 certification we had conquered with so much effort over the years was, after all, going to be irrelevant for the industry. Not to mention the detailed processes we had built to align teams and clients in very well defined tasks and waves of work, would all be compromised by a novelty we would need to learn how to use from scratch.

VirtualGeek – Understanding Storage Architectures

This is a topic that is a perennial one – and I suspect it will keep evolving. What is the right way to classify architectural models of storage? How does one figure out what the heck is going on through all the marketing and positioning of the industry players (including EMC for that matter)?

WARNING – THIS POST IS NOT FOR THE INTELLECTUALLY LAZY – OR PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT INTO READING 🙂

… Don’t say I didn’t warn you 🙂

It IS possible to have a taxonomy for storage/persistence architectures, a “phylum” (that’s the grouping of animals in biology, and translates from new latin as “class”) if you will. If you think of the “tree of life” (below – hey, that’s us Humans right next to bears and fungi!) as the world of technology domains, down the information persistence (vs. compute vs. network) “kingdom”, there are indeed “phylum” (classes).

This is an powerful intellectual tool – one that helped humans understand the living world around us.

When it comes applying this “phylum” idea to the topic of storage architectures, it lets you group anything new you see in the whole world of “persisting data”, and QUICKLY understand it’s core architecture, and therefore strengths and weaknesses. I challenge you all to put something on the table that doesn’t fit these broad based buckets.

On another note, as you might imagine, there’s been a lot of discussion over the last 24 hour about Cisco UCS Invicta (formerly Whiptail assets) inside EMC. It’s an old familiar player (Whiptail) on the field in new form, I’ll try to put them into this framework (input welcome!)

CIO Insight – The Future of Enterprise Mobility

To better understand the immediate future of enterprise mobility, CIO Insight recently spoke separately with Chris Hazelton, research director of mobile and wireless technologies at 451 Research, and Chris Marsh, a principal analyst of enterprise mobility at Yankee Group. The pair discussed mobility trends, device vendors, mobile ROI, and related developments for the enterprise in 2014 and beyond. Here is an edited version of the one-on-one interviews with Hazelton and Marsh.

What are the most important trends affecting how IT handles mobility today?

Chris Hazelton: The two biggest trends driving the way that IT handles mobility are the limited ability to control the devices that employees are using and the increasing amount of corporate data that is going across these devices. This dynamic means IT must control a growing use of corporate data in an environment in which it is steadily losing control.

As IT has ceded ground to users in terms of the devices that are used, the invasion of mobile apps will need to be a rallying point for organizations to regain control of mobile by managing the enterprise data, apps and work environments on mobile devices. Users can control the device, but IT will need to be the gatekeeper for data.

Neovise – 12 Things IaaS Providers Don’t Advertise

The industry is teeming with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers, each marketing the unique capabilities and benefits of their services. It would be great if service providers also highlighted their solutions’ shortcomings. But this is rarely the case, especially when competing solutions share the same feature gaps.

When evaluating and purchasing IaaS services, you must be aware of the things cloud service providers don’t advertise, and may not want you to know. To help you avoid surprises and setbacks, we’ve constructed a list of 12 considerations.

1. Many IaaS providers oversubscribe their instances

When service providers host multiple tenants on shared hardware, the combination of virtual resources they’ve allocated to each tenant is usually more than the total hardware capacity. This can result in poor performance – and inconsistent performance – when competing instances get used heavily. Some providers avoid this practice, or offer dedicated instances, but charge a premium price. For some applications, the premium is worth it.

CIO Insight – How CIOs Really Feel about Technology

You live it. You breathe it. But do you actually like technology? Yes, apparently you do. At least that’s the impression cast by a new survey from The Harris Poll. While you may spend your entire day immersed in pursuits of cloud, mobility, data analytics and other IT innovations, the research provides a welcome opportunity to take a step back and assess how you truly feel about the impact of it all upon society. And to add comparative value, the survey contrasts the responses of CIOs and other tech leaders to sentiments of the general U.S. population. Certainly, there are differences of opinion. But on topics such as tech’s overall impact on our lives and its capacity to spark innovation and creativity, you’ll be happy to see that perspectives are fairly positive overall.

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.