If you’re sitting in a presentation about the “new IT”, there’s bound to be a guest speaker talking about their digital transformation or service provider shift in their organization. You can see this coming. It’s a polished speaker, usually a CIO or VP. They talk about how, with the help of the vendor on stage with them, they were able to rapidly transform their infrastructure into something modern while at the same time changing processes to accommodate faster IT response, more productive workers, and increase revenue or transform IT from a cost center to a profit center. The key components are simple:

1. Buy new infrastructure from $vendor
2. Transform all processes to be more agile, productive, and better.

Why do those things always happen in concert?

Spring Cleaning

Infrastructure grows old. That’s a fact of life. Outside of some very specialized hardware, no one is using the same desktop they had ten years ago. No enterprise is still running Windows 2000 server on an IBM NetFinity server. No one is still using 10Mbps Ethernet over Thinnet to connect their offices. Hardware marches on. So when we buy new things, we as technology professionals need to find a way to integrate them into our existing technology stack.

Processes, on the other hand, are very slow to change. I can remember dealing with process issues when I was an intern for IBM many, many years ago. The process we had for deploying a new workstation had many, many reboots involved. The deployment team worked out a new strategy to streamline deployments and make things run faster. We brought our plan to the head of deployments. From there, we had to:

• Run tests to prove that it was faster
• Verify that the process wasn’t compromised in any way
• Type up new procedures in formal language to match the existing docs
• Then submit them for ISO approval

And when all those conditions were met, we could finally start using our process. All in all, with aggressive testing, it still took two months.

Processes are things that are thought to be carved in stone, never to be modified or changed in any way for the rest of time. Unless the stones break or something major causes a process change. Usually, that major change is a whole truckload of new equipment showing up on the back dock attached to a consultant telling IT there is a better way (TM) to do things.

Ceteris Paribus

Ceteris Paribus is a latin term that means “all else unchanged”. We use it when we talk about having multiple variables in an equation and the need to keep them constant to be able to measure changes appropriately.

The funny thing about all these transformations is that it’s hard to track what actually made improvements when you’re changing so many things at once. If the new hardware is three or four times faster than your old equipment, would it show that much improvement if you just used your old software and processes on it? How much faster could your workloads execute with new CPUs and memory management techniques? How about collapsing your virtual infrastructure onto fewer and fewer physical servers because of advances there? Running old processes on new hardware can give you a very good idea of how good the hardware is. Does it meet the criteria for selection that you wanted when it was purchased? Or, better still, does it seems like you’re not getting the performance you paid for?

Likewise, how are you able to know for sure that the organization and process changes you implemented actually did anything? If you’re implementing them on new hardware how can you capture the impact? There’s no rule that says that new processes can only be implemented on new shiny hardware. Take a look at what Walmart is doing with OpenStack. They most certainly aren’t rushing out to buy tons and tons of new servers just for OpenStack integration. Instead, they are taking streamlined processes and implementing them on existing infrastructure to see the benefits. Then it’s easy to measure and say how much hardware you need to expand instead of overbuying for the process changes you make.

Tom’s Take

So, why do these two changes always seem to track with each other? The optimist in me wants to believe that it’s people deciding to make positive changes all at once to pull their organization into the future. Since any installation is disruptive, it’s better to take the huge disruption and retrain for the massive benefits down the road. It’s a rosy picture indeed.

The pessimist in me wonders if all these massive changes aren’t somehow tied to the fact that they always come with massive new hardware purchases from vendors. I would hope there isn’t someone behind the scenes with the ear of the CIO pushing massive changes in organization and processes for the sake of numbers. I would also sincerely hope that the idea isn’t to make huge organizational disruptions for the sake of “reducing overhead” or “helping tell the world your story” or, worse yet, “making our product look good because you did such a great job with all these changes”.

The optimist in me is hoping for the best. But the pessimist in me wonders if reality is a bit less rosy.