As our desk calendars—whether the old analog type I continue to use, or newfangled calendar apps on our PCs or tablets—are changed over to pristine 2012 editions, many planners are finding it difficult to manifest the same levels of enthusiasm for new initiatives and projects that used to come so easily. Words such as “IT competitive advantage” and “agility” seem to have lost their luster, and newer concepts such as “Big Data” just don’t seem to resonate, especially as many firms enter their fourth or more year of budgetary belt-tightening and doing more with less.
The simple fact is that, for many, austerity fatigue is setting in.
A calendar invite to meet with senior management is being viewed less as a welcomed opportunity to discuss future goals and strategies and more as a dreaded existential event with its own countdown clock and many days of acid indigestion and sleeplessness.
What is it this time? Will management demand bigger cuts in staff and resources in the coming year or will they “seek input” on how best to implement a “cloud” strategy (aka outsourcing) that they just read about in an article in Barron’s or Forbes? Such worry saps zeal and fosters career dissatisfaction; in some cases, even mental depression and other health problems.
I spent some time over the holidays with IT folk. They said clearly what they don’t need right now is a trite, half-time locker room pep talk about “the tough getting going.” I found myself wondering whether an equally unsound prescription would be to recommend staring at your shoes or contemplating your navel 24 hours a day.
When you think about it, nothing we face today is different from what we’ve confronted in years past. We’ve weathered hard times before. Clearly, what we need to do now (as then) is to start innovating.
As early as 2004, Accenture was warning its clients about technology austerity programs that many had already adopted. They emphasized that management’s motivation to reign in IT costs, after nearly a decade of spending to create a Web-facing infrastructure, while understandable, was shortsighted. With a platform implemented, it was time to focus on targeting tighter integration with business processes and improved management of both infrastructure and IT service delivery. They said that high-performing companies needed to “continue to value technology innovation … with an eye toward strategic goals” that could enable information technology to contribute both to the development of new business architectures capable of producing greater earnings and, of course, more cost-efficient operations.
Weary in the post-dot.com era, many companies ignored the advice (remember the IBM TV ad about there being no more costs to cut with the magical cost-cutting sword?) and began de-funding IT years before the onset of our current economic woes. Today, they find themselves in the very austerity trap Accenture foretold.
Your mission in 2012 is to rescue management from its own foibles. Start by referring to your mainframe data center as an “internal cloud.” Much as we loathe the marketecture inherent in the term, it’s a meme that has gone viral. When management says they read how cloud technology would dramatically reduce costs, agree wholeheartedly. Compliment them on their acumen and note that you’ve already implemented the world’s best cloud platform (a mainframe, that is, but don’t use the “m” word) and are proceeding to expand the cloud to encompass the distributed computing infrastructure as well. That should raise their eyebrows.
When management mentions VMware, as they very well might since that vendor probably sponsored the article in the business magazine, avoid spitting in disgust. Just say you’re indeed testing that technology (who hasn’t?) but that you’re finding it to be less promising than next generation technologies that will eliminate the need for hypervisors altogether—such as LPARs. Tell them to think “application on demand,” launching user applications directly from storage when needed, without the requirement to instantiate them on a server at all. When they give you a blank look, tell them that’s how their smartphone or tablet works today. Tell them you plan to move all back-end databases into a more manageable cloud platform, pushing out end-user apps on demand so they don’t sit on a server, consuming resources and utility power while waiting for someone to use them. Tell them you expect such a strategy to deliver the goods in terms of dramatically reduced power consumption, equipment requirements, and administrator requirements—bending the cost curve while improving service levels.
Truth be told, you won’t be prevaricating one iota, just euphemizing a bit to make the truth more palatable to those in search of quick silver bullet fixes to technically non-trivial problems. With platform issues set aside, start nudging for application project funding—that’s where money really needs to be spent.
My two cents for the New Year.
