this is ha.rley.org

Professional Writing

Harley Young — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:14:24 -0700

Professional Writing

Does Legacy Organizational Design Threaten to Leave Your Cloud Computing Initiative Up in Smoke? Public, private and hybrid clouds present tremendous opportunity for organizations to reduce costs, lower their carbon footprints and enable more fluid responses to the competing demands for information technology resources. Unfortunately, legacy organizational design may hamstring progress.
Project Planning in Mergers, Acquisitions and Divestitures. Early involvement of the IT organization in the due diligence that precedes corporate mergers, acquisitions and divestitures is one of the strongest predictors of success. This article examines a planning approach that has garnered praise from clients during successful mergers in the retail and financial services industries.
IT as a Strategic Driver in the Public Sector. With a few notable exceptions, technology issues in the public sector are not substantially different than those in any other large multinational enterprise. Nonetheless, the public sector appears to have three problems (and one superb opportunity) that distinguish it from most other organizations. Technology can enable change through authenticity, connectivity, visibility and availability.
Automating Billing with Perl and the Google Docs API. On a recent project, a client wanted weekly billings to track project expenses. I tracked the information in a Google Spreadsheet, but didn't want to prepare a time sheet each week, so I automated the process with a few common tools.
ICT's Future Requires You to Tear Down Walls. A network organizational structure enables BMW (for instance) to focus on design while a partner hydroforms vehicle chassis, or casts engine blocks. This article argues that advances in technology have enabled a similar structure within enterprise ICT groups, offers practical advice on navigating the transition, and describes resulting enhancements to organizational performance.
Kick Your Excel Habit. Consultants use Excel for nearly everything, including things for which it's not best suited. A new feature from Google Docs can help you kick the Excel habit, liberate you from the monotony of collating and enable you to focus on delivering high-value services to your clients.
Servers Without Hypervisors Are Missing Something. A lot of ink has been spilled about the benefits of virtualization, yet penetration rates are still perplexingly low. Vendors continue to focus on benefits, but their audience is already convinced. Instead, vendors should spend more time articulating just how clients can realize the benefits. This paper offers three ways to unlock the power of virtualization.
Enterprise Mobility. Many companies invest heavily developing web-based solutions that permit users to access important information. And then they go and screw things up by creating a solution that requires people to use a PC. Don't make your mobile workforce haul around a laptop in order to look up a customer's phone number. Instead, account for the unique persona of mobile users when you're designing solutions.
Electronic Social Networks. Electronic social networking platforms such as Facebook provide a mechanism that encourages the development of communities around shared interests and offers participants a low-involvement way to activate latent relationships among one-time associates:
1. It can help identify and close new business opportunities.
2. It enables employees (and their employers) to benefit from expanding networks of experts who may be consulted for their advice or encouraged to join an organization as an employee.
3. Analysis of the social networks that emerge within an organization can help inform discussion about the appropriateness of current organization design to the achievement of business goals.
Real-World Web Services. Watching people do the kind of mind-numbing work that computers were created to perform is agonizing. Recently, I spotted a colleague cutting and pasting text (participant data) from thousands of Excel spreadsheets into a master spreadsheet from which she'd assign participants to training facilities. Using Perl and the Google Maps API, I showed her a better way.
Free/Open Source Software. Open source solutions present business with opportunities and risks alike. While investigating open source solutions, firms would do well to identify the obligations they accept by using open source software. They should not be afraid to accept the license terms, but should do so knowingly. A point of view I wrote with David and Richard examines this topic. Another paper titled The New Open Source looks at more recent events in the space and the implications for organizations.
CRM & Project Management. I built a tool that's pretty useful for small businesses. The software was built to be generic and easily customizable for various organizations and implemented in ASP. If you're interested in a license, please contact me. It's free, but I like to keep track of who is using it and make sure it's set up right for your team.

Resume of Harley Young

Harley Young — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:34:47 -0700

Resume of Harley Young

Harley Young

Calgary, AB
h@rley.org
http://ha.rley.org/
Concise Resume
Detailed Resume

For more than a decade, I have been working with terrific clients in health care, retail, entertainment and the public sector to design award-winning systems that enable collaboration, triage and data analysis. My expertise includes technology strategy, platform architecture/infrastructure, identity and privacy management and emerging technology. I’m happiest when I can help clients create solutions that enhance their business performance. While technology often enables me, big success is ultimately comprised of hundreds of small victories that emerge from conversations shared with clients, peers and vendors. I am tenacious, have an insatiable hunger for knowledge, and adore sharing my sense of excitement about what is possible.

Experience Highlights

Designed and managed deployment of technology infrastructure supporting more than a million end users
Led consolidation, capacity planning, standards development (ITIL/ITSM) and disaster-recovery/business continuity planning within heterogeneous IT environments
Managed multiple complex projects through all phases of the life cycle, including budgeting, project planning, and issue/risks identification and mitigation
Recruited and managed high-performing teams up to 30 members
Helped grow existing accounts to more than $6M in annual billings
Boosted organizational profile by publishing magazine articles and speaking publicly on topics such as enterprise mobility, web services and the design of ICT organizations

Professional Experience (2000 - Present)

Retail Store Refresh Program Coordinator, Deloitte Consulting

Engagement Summary: The retail stores division of this global media and entertainment conglomerate engaged Deloitte to assist with coordination of design and implementation its new retail store concept.

I worked with the client’s retail stores division to coordinate and manage activities across the guest experience, marketing, store operations, IT, software development, and design and construction work streams. My focus was to deliver practical solutions to operational and technical challenges that surfaced during roll-out of new retail stores that incorporated an array of immersive technology experiences built upon Macs, iPads, RFID readers and touch screen displays.

In this role, I developed and managed a project plan that tracked activities across the client, contractor and vendor teams within North America and Europe. I also oversaw design of the operational support model, definition of team roles, delivery of weekly briefings to executive leadership, and support of ongoing discussions related to vendor selection, contract pricing and tax treatment for international procurement.

M&A Infrastructure Integration Lead, Accenture

Engagement Summary: Accenture was engaged by this Canadian life-insurer to assist with the post-merger integration of IT infrastructure.

With peers from the strategy and insurance practices, I led the infrastructure integration workstream at this large Canadian life insurer. As part of the engagement, I managed client IT staff through assessment and planning for Day 1, and integration planning and roadmap development for the next 18 months. During the project, I developed tools that helped technical staff articulate their day-to-day tasks, and identified opportunities to use virtualization to streamline the migration, and simultaneously consolidate and simplify their technology environment.

Storage Virtualization Project Manager, Accenture

Engagement Summary: This large Canadian electrical utility sought assistance support with an IT transformation focused on storage cost reduction, agility and “greening” IT operations.

I managed a team of six through planning, design and implementation of an enterprise storage virtualization project based on the NetApp v-Series platform. The work included IT skill assessments and remediation recommendations, as well as new governance mechanisms for managing demand and allocation of enterprise IT resources. The new storage platform resulted in savings of more than 16TB of storage, and shrunk SAP test environment provisioning from a 2-day to a 2-hour procedure. The engagement delivered capital and operational cost savings, lowered the client's environmental impact, enhanced the agility of the IT organization, and laid the foundation for their next-generation data centre.

Technical Architect & Development Lead, Deloitte Consulting

Engagement Summary: The Pennsylvania Department of Health chose Deloitte to lead an ambitious project to integrate its myriad disease reporting and surveillance systems into a single, web-based solution.

I led design, development and deployment of Pennsylvania's online disease reporting and surveillance software, PA-NEDSS. The system integrated the state's myriad public health tools into a single, web-based solution and continues to garner attention as one of the country's most complete disease reporting and surveillance systems.

In this role, I recruited, interviewed and hired nearly all members of the technical team, managed project schedules, wrote substantial portions of the software, and orchestrated delivery of components from various vendor teams: Microsoft Consulting Services (Public Key Infrastructure), Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (data modeling) and ESRI (GIS components).

Code & Configuration Management Process Architect, Deloitte Consulting

Engagement Summary: This $13 billion health care insurer engaged Deloitte to help minimize production problems stemming from inefficient processes; to add consistency and standardization to the tools used during the application development lifecycle; and, to enhance controls that govern the migration, packaging and promotion of software through the environments from development to production.

Using best practices from CMMI, I led a team through analysis of the current software configuration management practices across the organization’s multi-platform environment. Following analysis of the current state, the team worked with the client to develop a future-state architecture, and to create a road map that established short term and strategic goals for configuration management environment, and led to more predictable and consistent outcomes during large software development projects.

M&A Data Center Integration Architect & Project Manager, Deloitte Consulting

Engagement Summary: This leading retail grocer acquired the Northern California and Nevada operations of Albertsons, doubling in size to approximately 260 stores and $5 billion in annual revenues. Deloitte was retained to assist with many components of the post-merger integration and transformation.

I led the client’s IT organization through upgrades to pricing, HR and finance applications, and refreshed the enterprise Windows and Novell environments. The team also added VMware and SAN capacity, quadrupled the size of Citrix farm and sourced and specified the necessary upgrades to the disaster recovery facility. During the engagement, I also assisted with design of the IT operating model, identification of skill and capability gaps, and development of the training materials that supported new employee orientation.

ERP Platform Architect & IT Rationalization Project Manager, Deloitte Consulting

Engagement Summary: This video games titan engaged Deloitte to help simplify its global ERP platform, and develop a consolidation roadmap to simplify the IT landscape and reduce operational costs.

Working with peers from Deloitte's Enterprise Applications group and members of the client’s enterprise architecture team, Harley led design of a consolidation initiative to collapse five globally distributed instances of Oracle Applications into a single global master. As part of a broad cost-reduction program, the engagement included IT consolidation related to enterprise messaging, and hosting services in support of the client’s rapidly growing online gaming environment.

Enterprise Platform & Security Architect, Deloitte Consulting

Engagement Summary: The Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry selected Deloitte to help it implement CWDS: the Comprehensive Workforce Development System. CWDS was designed to enhance employer competitiveness and innovation, while preparing Pennsylvanians for new careers in higher-wage jobs.

Working directly with the CIO of the Pennsylvania Department of Labour and Industry, I led enterprise architecture consolidation and helped align the technology platforms upon which more than $150 million of system modernization activities were being delivered. Key among this consolidation was the establishment of an Enterprise Identity and Access Management framework that spanned two large agencies and supported more than 2 million users.

My pioneering work resulted in more than $2 million in direct savings, a service-oriented platform to support future modernization initiatives and recognition by the Computerworld Laureate program as an extraordinary example of information technology being employed in a government setting.

Infrastructure Manager & Security Specialist, Deloitte Consulting

Engagement Summary: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) selected Deloitte to help it implement PEMS: the Program Evaluation and Monitoring System. This software assists the CDC in measuring efficacy of its HIV/AIDS intervention and prevention efforts.

Supported by a team of ten, I was responsible for system security, capacity planning and infrastructure design related to CDC's national HIV/AIDS program evaluation and monitoring system (PEMS). My security responsibilities included application vulnerability testing with Watchfire AppScan, and guiding PEMS through the Certification and Accreditation process required by all federal information systems (NIST SP 800-37).

As part of the role, I was responsible for hiring and managing Deloitte and subcontract resources who comprised the technical, production support and help desk teams. I worked closely with the development team to recommend and design software to secure the privacy of data during the information gathering process, and to migrate code through staging, training, production support and training environments for each release. I also led performance testing and capacity planning activities, and design of the hosting platform from caching Web servers to SAN storage for the database cluster.

Prior Experience

tothedoor.com, Network Architect (2000)

Joining a cadre of other technophiles excited about this startup, I developed a 24×7 data center solution, drafted SLAs, authored an enterprise security policy and developed a comprehensive disaster-recovery plan. I also implemented SNMP monitoring of all network devices, wrote substantial sections of the back-end software and worked with corporate partners to develop an OEM appliance based on BeOS.

ProMIRA Software & Manugistics, Technology Consultant (1996 – 2000)

As a member of the professional services organization, I implemented Manugistics software for clients including iMotors.com, Merial, Goodyear, Lexmark, Pfizer and Seiko/Epson. Each engagement called for different skills including system administration, software development and the design and delivery of technical training. My flexibility, rapid learning and affable nature made me a trusted advisor to clients and a frequently consulted member of the professional services team. The vignettes below represents two of my many successes.

iMotors.com I designed, developed, and implemented a Perl-based suite of tools that used a distributed cluster of servers to collect and process more than 15GB (daily) of HTML from various Web sites. The HTML was cleaned and standardized using pattern matching algorithms before being loaded into a data warehouse, where it satisfied queries by customer-care agents.
Merial I worked with a team at Merial to reduce factory scheduling time from 48 hours to just 2. As part of this engagement, I created Perl scripts to extract, transform and load data from the MRP system into NetWORKS Scheduling and provided advice to optimize application performance. Before leaving, I created and delivered a training program to ensure IT staff could maintain the system in my absence.

Education & Technical Expertise

I hold a Master of Science in Management (MIS) and an Honours Bachelor of Commerce (MIS) from Queen’s University and Lakehead University, respectively. I graduated first in my class from Lakehead University and, during my senior year, placed first in the MIS category of the Queen's Inter Collegiate Business Competition.

Beyond my academic training, I hold an MCSE and have exposure to an array of technology including SiteMinder, Identity Manager, VMware, the Rational Suite, Mercury Quality Center, BEA WebLogic, JBoss, IIS, Active Directory (LDAP), Exchange Server and collaborative technology including blogs, wikis and enterprise content management systems. I also has experience creating ITIL reporting dashboards and developing stand-alone and Web-based software with .NET, Perl, PHP, JavaScript and XML technologies. For customers from the Fortune 500 to the US Government, I have designed and supported platforms running Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL on Linux, OS X and all versions of Windows.

Publications

I have published commercial and scholarly work on a variety of topics such as virtualization, enterprise mobility, web services, electronic social networks, open source software and the transformative impact of IT on organizational structures.

Personal Pursuits

When not traveling – a part of the job I enjoy – I like tinkering with electronics and am an avid long-distance runner.

Books On The Go

Harley Young — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:45:06 -0700

Books On The Go

Photo Gallery

Harley Young — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:58:11 -0700

Photo Gallery

This page displays a live thumbnail feed from one of my PicasaWeb albums – probably the one I've updated mostly recently. Over time, the active feed will change, but you can find all the separate albums online:

Clicking on any of the pictures below will take you to the full-sized image, but you'll get a pretty good idea of what's going on just by looking at the thumbnails. If you prefer to skip this whole “checking-in” production, you can subscribe to the the RSS photo feed for any of the albums.

All A Twitter

Harley Young — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 08:18:43 -0700

All A Twitter

@superblue Ed's at 17th and McLeod Trail S. has gluten free pizza. Can't vouch for taste, but saw the sign and thought of you.
Hoedown' from Copland's Rodeo Suite is easily one of my favourite classical pieces, so I adore this video: http://vimeo.com/5020134
I think the new zEnterprise 196 might be the the ultimate cloud computing platform for large enterprises not yet willing to go public cloud.
What has 96 cores, 3TB of RAM, 112 x86 blades and can run 100K virtual machines? The new IBM zSeries mainframe! #mysaturdaynight

Does Legacy Organizational Design Threaten to Leave Your Cloud Computing Initiative Up in Smoke?

Harley Young — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 11:43:55 -0700

Does Legacy Organizational Design Threaten to Leave Your Cloud Computing Initiative Up in Smoke?

Abstract

Public, private and hybrid clouds present tremendous opportunity for organizations to reduce costs, lower their carbon footprints and enable more fluid responses to the competing demands for information technology resources. Unfortunately, legacy organizational design may hamstring progress. This paper explores how cloud computing can help IT departments shift to service and value driven organizations, and addresses the evolutionary gap they must cross if they are to achieve their goals of improving service to the business.

Introduction

During the early part of this decade, tremendous revenue growth supported expansion of IT budgets in many organizations. Although enhanced funding enabled some ambitious transformations, escalating technology spending also masked issues that have more recently become evident, chief among them complexity and effectiveness. With sinking economic fortunes comes the need for cost containment and a renewed focus on the intersection of IT efficiency and IT effectiveness—IT impact.

There are many components to IT impact, so there are many opportunities to uncover value. One of the most pernicious threats to IT impact is the many forms of complexity: duplicate systems; one-off applications; legacy contracts with myriad vendors; shadow IT departments; absent documentation; data duplication; manual workflows; and, proprietary systems and interfaces.

The image above illustrates the path to minimizing complexity and enhancing IT impact. IT departments with a great deal of complexity are chaotic and reactive: they devote the majority of their time to fire-fighting and most of their budget is associated with merely keeping existing systems operating. As the IT platform is optimized, IT departments become more proactive. Standards emerge, and automation ensures more time and money can be dedicated to innovation. Nonetheless, it’s not until IT groups reach the stage of revisiting earlier decisions, and redesigning (or eliminating) older processes that they’ll find themselves equipped with the sort of cognitive and fiscal surplus necessary to make the leap to a service and value driven organization.

Virtualization: The Rise of the Cloud

With spending on operations and maintenance accounting for nearly 70% of enterprise IT budgets, the latest economic downturn has compelled IT departments to seek new routes to improve the impact of their IT investments. In pursuit of this objective, many embarked on virtualization initiatives to take advantage of its numerous benefits:

Improved IT Efficiency. In addition to the hardware savings associated with system consolidation, virtualization increases operational efficiency. Because of the consolidation, firms are able to reclaim capacity (real estate, electricity, and cooling) in their data centers, deferring costly expansion plans.
Compressed Delivery Schedules. Virtualization accelerates server and application deployment, enables IT organization to deploy defined “packages” based on a service catalog, and simplifies application management throughout the lifecycle from development, through test and to production.
Enhanced IT Services. Although no technology can eliminate failures, virtualization makes recovering from outages (even catastrophic ones) faster, easier and less expensive and helps deliver more consistent and predictable IT services.

Based on the results of virtualization initiatives, many firms incorporated the technology into their portfolio. In fact, recent industry surveys suggest that most firms will be virtualizing more than 50% of their servers before 2012. Cloud computing represents the next step in this evolution.

Cloud computing is a disruptive innovation that expands its frontier with each evolution of technology. Although the idea of hosted applications emerged during the 90s in the form of Application Service Providers (ASPs), it was not until the rise of web-based Software as a Service (SaaS) that the model became more widely accepted as a viable component of enterprise architecture. A decade later, enabled by advances in technology, SaaS vendors have expanded their portfolios, and new entrants have pushed the cloud deeper into IT organizations with additional service classes, broadly:

Data Storage as a Service
Infrastructure as a Service
Hardware as a Service
Communications as a Service
Platform as a Service

Understandably, many organizations are concerned about having third-parties manage critical components of their business infrastructure. However, just as appropriate methods exist to mitigate whatever risks accompany shared real estate, shared telecommunications networks, and shared business process outsourcers, most organizations can overcome whatever barriers discourage adoption of cloud-based technology solutions.

Implications for the Large Enterprise

Whereas small and mid-sized organizations may leverage public cloud infrastructures offered by Microsoft, Amazon and Google, nowhere is the opportunity to create, leverage and benefit from private and hybrid clouds as great as within the world’s largest organizations: the Fortune 100. Each of the multinational conglomerates that comprise the Fortune 100 employ tens to hundreds of thousands of globally distributed workers. With such size and scope of services, the firms that comprise the Fortune 100 are ideal candidates for cloud computing.

They have many departments sharing and processing related information, and nearly all would benefit from stronger collaboration and knowledge exchange. As firms try to distil information from the volumes of information collected about their business, using single-instance cloud-based data repositories can help eliminate data silos and produce actionable business intelligence.
Consolidation has lead to de facto standardization within enterprise IT infrastructure. Accordingly, systems architectures are apt to include many commodity hardware and software components, which will make the transition to cloud computing less jarring.
Resource-intensive consolidation that characterizes cloud computing can help IT organizations address the imbalance between spending on operations and innovation. With some organizations devoting 80% of their IT budget to operations, they have scant little opportunity to innovate. Although cloud computing is not a panacea for all issues within an IT organization, it provides an objective measure of service costs, which is an integral part of building an appropriate charge-back model.

In spite of the opportunity presented by cloud computing, adoption is threatened by legacy funding models and existing organizational designs that fail to incorporate both advances in technology, and the role IT plays in enabling increasingly collaborative business processes that frequently transcend divisional (and often organizational) boundaries. Indeed, a recent Forrester survey of business and IT executives suggests that as organizations contemplate their path forward, nearly 25% of them face funding or other organizational impediments that impair their adoption of internal compute clouds.

The move from silos of single-purpose IT infrastructure to extra-agency hybrid clouds is evolutionary, but does nonetheless represent a substantial transformation in the way that IT services are managed and delivered. As noted earlier, many existing organizational designs are poorly equipped to accommodate this change. In fact, existing organizational design and the mechanism through which money is obligated encourages (if not mandates) isolated IT investments, thereby curtailing progress toward a more agile IT organization that can respond quickly to new demands. The figure below illustrates the evolutionary gap in the path ahead.

As IT organizations strive to mature from reactive entities to value-driven service providers, the sophistication of their IT infrastructure must keep pace. Accordingly, infrastructure will generally evolve from single-purpose servers, to nascent virtualization initiatives at the department level. Once departments are comfortable with virtualization, several may consolidate their installations as they strive to increase resource utilization and squeeze additional benefits from the technology. Although many departments will continue to refine their environments through process improvement and automation, none will make the leap across the evolutionary gap without first taking four steps:

Financial Investment. Although cloud computing boosts resource utilization, outcomes can be improved further by combining the migration with portfolio optimization efforts. Migration and portfolio optimization demand testing and remediation of existing systems. IT staff, too, will require additional training to ensure they’re capable of managing a dynamic and increasingly abstract environment. As the migration further obscures the distinction between virtual servers and their underlying physical hardware, employees responsible for managing the infrastructure will need to evolve new processes for capacity management, and root-cause analysis inside a virtual environment. Each of these activities requires investment - sometimes substantial - to ensure that the evolution of IT not only supports but also enables the business.
System & Information Security. Although the most insidious data breaches and threats to corporate information security originate from within corporate boundaries. Nonetheless, when data and information processing move beyond the corporate perimeter, there often exists a perception of greater risk. While corporate-managed infrastructure is not inherently more secure, it is important to address concerns about perceived data and system security risks, so they do not distract organizations from addressing the real challenges of security, governance and automation associated with enterprise cloud adoption.
A Refreshed Organizational Design. Large enterprises must establish and fund a new entity to manage the (cloud) platform infrastructure, and adjust the way IT funding is obligated to all divisions. The funding change would compel divisions to access IT capacity through the service layer provided by the new entity, while engaging distributed IT departments and third-party providers to design and deliver end-to-end technology solutions (as in the figure below). The newly created IT organization would allow other divisions or subsidiaries to shift their focus to outcomes—such as improved risk modeling, and predictive analytics—while allowing specialists to manage the technology implementation. In concept, the new IT organization is similar to an enterprise shared services group insofar as it transcends agency boundaries to service all branches of the organization.

Although creating a new shared service department is necessary, it is not alone sufficient. It is also crucial to examine the structure of the new organization. To a greater or lesser degree, the structure of IT organizations is the consequence of a desire for alignment with the business; the need for freedom and control; and resource availability, capacity and capability. Although most IT organizations exist somewhere along centralization-decentralization continuum, little attention has been paid to alternatives. Supported by technological innovation, a new possibility has emerged for the design of IT organizations, one that mimics a pattern common among the sophisticated and mature industries of aerospace and automotive manufacturing: the network organization. By moving toward a network model, the new IT organization can shift its focus to providing design expertise, service delivery excellence (rather than prescribed implementation), foundational platforms and frameworks, and program co-ordination and management. This change will enable business to respond to emerging demands with greater agility.
Executive Leadership & Support. Because embracing cloud computing requires long-term commitment, financial investment, and potentially tumultuous changes to the organization, vision, support and direction from senior leadership are all crucial to a successful transformation. The absence will result in compromises that do not deliver on promises and are certain to result in cloud initiatives being painted as little more than an experiment with the latest technology fad.

The New Face of the IT Organization

Without the necessary precursors of financial investment; system and information security; a refreshed organizational design; and, executive leadership and support cloud initiatives will struggle to deliver on promises. However, with those pillars in place, a new IT organization can emerge with a focus on platform architecture, standardization, and co-ordination of distributed (sometimes extra-organization) teams as illustrated previously.

Some departments will undoubtedly balk at being mandated to purchase IT services from an agency beyond their control. Notwithstanding their trepidation, if one accepts that the new IT organization’s first responsibility is to serve its customers, one should also accept that it is the IT organization’s responsibility to provide the best possible service. In the same way that governments often establish import tariffs to provide domestic producers with short-term protection from large foreign competitors, the IT purchase mandate might be made to expire in 5 years. Offering such temporary “protection” would help incentivize service excellence from the new IT organization, and afford it sufficient time to develop both foundational infrastructure services, and promulgate frameworks and standards that would streamline a later migration to externally managed clouds if agencies believe their needs could be better serviced elsewhere. Although standards do raise the specter of defection, the effect seen at Google is more likely. By providing no-cost access to data and application programming interfaces for franchises such as Maps, Documents and Advertising, Google has not generally seen developers take their data elsewhere. Instead, developers have strengthened their bond by building value added services atop the Google foundation.

Next Steps

Migration scope and speed are the primary levers used to alter the benefit-cost ratio of cloud initiatives. While organizations as large as the Fortune 100 may require time to address privacy, data stewardship and information security concerns, they also stand to derive substantial benefit from the scale of their operations. Consequently, as they work to overcome barriers, they should begin development of their enterprise cloud strategy, adjust organizational and governance structures, and move to construct their own private clouds. Later, the scope of cloud initiatives can expand to engage external partners, to enable hybrid clouds.

With the majority of IT spend allocated to operations and maintenance, initiatives that pledge to improve the efficiency of IT service delivery should be at the top of the new-project agenda. When those same initiatives have the potential to increase standardization, improve agility, and reduce the environmental impact of data centre operations, they demand much deeper inspection. To get started, the public sector should follow a five-step approach:

Plan. Develop a cloud-computing strategy and roadmap with 1, 3 and 5 year goals. This exercise should complement general IT planning, and should naturally support the broader organizational strategy.
Organize. Create and fund an organization responsible for delivering the strategy, and the projects identified by roadmap milestones.
Evolve. Adapt financial allocation models to ensure ongoing funding of the new IT organization.
Create. Begin construction of a private cloud, and nominate pilot services for migration into the environment. Start with something where the cost of failure is low and where teams have a chance to develop greater familiarity with the complexities of abstraction that define cloud computing.
Extend. Promote wins, recognize struggles, and pursue options for federation with others in the industry to create community clouds. While sharing infrastructure among competing organizations may seem counter-intuitive, there are many examples of successful industry partnerships, especially in financial services: Interac, Visa and Mastercard being the most immediately recognizable. Accordingly, the idea of community clouds is powerful because it affords an opportunity for firms to pursue their own goals, while still being able to leverage powerful IT infrastructures without the inefficiencies associated with point solutions.

Final Thoughts

In a recent Gartner report on the maturity of technologies, cloud computing appears at the apogee of the peak of inflated expectations (figure below).

The current position suggests that many organizations are about to undertake on cloud computing initiatives in the absence of one or more of the crucial antecedents (financial investment; system and information security; a refreshed organizational design; and, executive leadership and support). Emboldened by earlier successes with virtualization, many will rush to embrace cloud computing without recognizing that, in spite of being the next step in the evolution of technology infrastructure, there are substantive and important characteristics that distinguish it from enterprise virtualization. Ignoring these differences can lead to spectacular failures, which in turn will lead to questions about the value of cloud computing. The best way to avoid these pitfalls (and avoid the trough of disillusionment) is to embrace the potential, but ignore the promises. That is, begin with smaller project to build momentum, and ensure there are clear goals that have measurable standards for success. As teams develop greater competence with the technology, and as the supporting processes mature, organizations can consider more complex projects. It’s important to move forward, and there’s value in doing so quickly, but starting small and completing work in manageable pieces will provide the necessary education needed to tackle more ambitious projects.

Although this paper argues that cloud computing offers the greatest opportunity to large organizations, the benefits of cloud adoption are certainly not confined to the Fortune 100. Indeed, other institutions stand to benefit in similar ways through cloud initiatives. Regardless of the organization embarking on the journey, however, it’s important to recognize that cloud computing is not technology alone. There are, of course, technology components, but if the cloud endeavor is to deliver durable value, it must evolve in concert with the development of people and the modification of organizational and governance structures.

References

Booz|Allen|Hamilton. (n.d.). The Economics of Cloud Computing. Retrieved December 27, 2009, from Booz|Allen|Hamilton Corporate Web Site: http://www.boozallen.com/publications/article/42656904

Evans, B. (2009, December 21). Global CIO: The Top 10 CIO Issues For 2010. Retrieved July 4, 2010, from InformationWeek: http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222002799

Forrester Consulting. (2009, July). The Business Value Of Virtualization. Retrieved March 21, 2010, from VMware Corporation Web Site: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/solutions/Business-Value-Virtualization.pdf

Forrester Consulting. (2010, January 28). Virtualization Management And Trends. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from Computer Associates: http://www.ca.com/files/IndustryAnalystReports/virtual_mgmt_trends_jan2010_227748.pdf

Gartner's 2009 Hype Cycle Special Report Evaluates Maturity of 1,650 Technologies . (2009, August 11). Retrieved April 8, 2010, from Gartner Web Site: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1124212

GMIS International. (n.d.). 2009 GMIS International CIO Focus Report. Retrieved December 27, 2009, from GMIS International Web Site: http://www.gmis.org/DocumentView.aspx?DID=35

Lo, H. L., Bartels, A., Daley, E., & Muteba, C. (2009, August 7). The State Of Enterprise IT Budgets: 2009. Retrieved December 27, 2009, from Forrester: http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/state_of_enterprise_it_budgets_2009/q/id/44146/t/2

Williams, M. (2009, November 19). 2010: NASCIO's Top 10 Priorities for State CIOs. Retrieved December 27, 2009, from Government Technology: http://www.govtech.com/gt/733486

Young, H. (1999). Driving Change in IS Structure: The Application of IT in the Shift Toward the Network IS Organization. Administrative Sciences Association of Canada (ASAC) Conference. Saint John, New Brunswick.

Youseff, L., Butrico, M., & Da Silva, D. (n.d.). Toward a Unified Ontology of Cloud Computing . Retrieved December 27, 2009, from http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~lyouseff/CCOntology/CloudOntology.pdf