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June 19, 2010

Forecast: Partly Cloudy

(All text and images copyright 2009, 2010 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra)

Emphasizing the obvious, when a business strategy works, business activities have impact. But it is more precise to say that the activities make the impact -- either by creating circumstances that allow it, or by directly causing it. So, the important way to start thinking about strategic "success" is to start with the practicals: activities mean tasks, and staff comes to work to do tasks with tools.

This makes it obvious why tools like I.T. (information technology) are not just helping business, but instead are an integral part of the "body" of business, as much as are people. Said differently, I.T. management has reasonably been a critical concern of the management of the internal "corporation" of the business.

While "internal IT" has evolved dramatically through several generations of computing, the essential organization of people and "IT" has not really changed: IT is part of the environment in which work is done.

However, generating the environment has not always been done exclusively from internal resources. Outsourcing is old news. And increasing technological advances based on use of the internet make it even more likely that the business will find opportunities to have production environments generated and/or hosted externally. Currently, the trend is mostly for external organizations to research and develop new web-based production environments first. While those external environments may then be shared by other businesses, the know-how for building such environments is also growing in, or migrating to, internal IT operations. As such, these new types of environments, called "clouds" are appearing in both external (usually shared or "tenanted") and internal  (usually private) variants, with privacy having a big lead in preference over sharing.

Companies that do not already have a "cloud" environment do already have an environment subject to a vast array of managerial concerns that address costs, engineering, and other factors that are decisive of the range, reach and utility of the environment's functionality in actual use. The different types of concerns also cut across the "levels" of structuring that compose the environment, which means that the overall management complex can be difficult to balance; when balance more or less exists, no one is especially excited to upset it -- and moving from that status quo to something different easily runs into a lot of resistance. 

 Yet in general, the reasons to make the move from a non-cloud environment to a cloud environment are business reasons: the two primary issues ultimately addressed by IT management of the work environment are economy of scope and economy of scale. If either one cannot be solved and sustained to the business's satisfaction, then there will be changes made of some kind. Economy of scope must be considered first, because it more closely relates to the reality of variety in the business's requirements. Normally, an internal non-cloud environment is tamed by managing the three key factors of its dynamics: demand, operation, and capacity. Management approaches focus strongly on the interrelationship of the three. Even the most general schema involves the following approach (as diagrammed)for packaging the Users'  environmental leveraging as services:

 

Put simply, without capacity, demand cannot be met, and without operations, there is no way to meet demand with capacity. Assuming this challenge is adequately addressed, there is always the matter of whether any of those key factors will change, so everyone is concerned about changes getting the upper hand. That set of conditions precedes the actual achievement level of economies of scale. Without economy of scale, the structural components of the environment do not "add up" well in the business perspective.

 

Good design helps to bring resources that are capable of supporting adequate economy of scale, but the actual deployment and utilization of the resources is what finally drives, and surfaces as, "economy". If not attended in a mature way, the dynamics of economy are more difficult to manage than the attributes of systems that can run at large scale: 

Moving an internal environment into a cloud formation will involve a very large number of decisions about what to add / move / change / delete in a restructuring, but most current business-perspective management issues will still be issues; the number of decisions will mount up more due to the number of components that are interlocked in providing services already. Determining those volumes and complexities is an exercise that is tied to the current state of affairs for each given environment, and the rest of this discussion is not aimed at illuminating that practical task. Instead, there is the matter of identifying, from the business perspective, what a managed cloud environment needs to be able to do,  which aims at the reasons and readiness for bothering with one.

That is, the functionalities that workers need supported by their environment must be available on demand, and the provision of those functionalities and support must be rationally administered by the business and by IT management within the business. Users need successful and appropriate interfaces for requesting well-defined services and options, on-demand. The managers of the environment must be able to understand true capacity and operate efficiently to apply it against managed types of demand. And, the perspectives of the Users and Managers must align.The framework shown below organizes these issues to indicate how they map to each other through appropriate administration and related practices.

In considering a move to a cloud environment, the first step is to foresee the organization of management itself as it should apply to the business requirements for the environment. Then, decisions about what and when to move can be made with the understanding that they are moving to something already visibly under control, where that control has a grip on the economies of scope and scale that make the environment correctly viable for the business. Practices such as compliance (including security), procedures (including ITIL), and consolidation (including virtualization) need to stay on the business radar as success factors that mean "porting" (or extending) management attention from the legacy environment to the new one. For leveraging an external cloud, this reaching over would mean engaging with a 3rd-party administration; but for an internal or private cloud the reach is about bandwidth, education and reorganization as necessary.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at June 19, 2010 1:05 PM