Champagne on a Beer Budget
At Gartner Symposium this week, I've been sitting through some very interesting sessions presented by Gartner analysts. One of my favorites was given by Donna Scott and Deb Curtis. Both have some excellent thoughts on how to transform IT operations from reactive roles to service organizations that serve as business enablers. The following quote brought some hearty chuckles from the audience:
"We all know that the business units want champagne service on a beer budget.” -Deb Curtis, Gartner
Deb offered this quote when outlining the many expectations placed on IT and WHY IT should look at turning it's offerings into "services" for business units that leverage repeatable processes and technology.
Finding ways to automate and optimize in the datacenter can help meet high expectations (the “champagne“) while still keeping costs low (the “beer“). iControl and iRules can be huge advantage, as they can help you automate those mundane, error-prone tasks (iControl) while optimizing the delivery of apps (iRules).
What caught my attention was the following audience feedback (via a "wave-of-hands” poll): the majority (50% +) of the audience felt they operate in a highly reactive mode as an IT organization. Only 25% felt they were in a proactive mode with less that 10% operating as a true "service" organization that offers standardized IT capabilities to business units. (BTW - this closely matches quantitative research Gartner has done on the topic...)
This means roughly 1 out of every 2 people reading this post are dealing with life in the “reactive trenches“. Which one is your organization? Are you responding to crises every day? Would you like to find more time to get in front of the crisis wave to actually drive strategy vs. reacting to problems? If so - DevCentral probably has some resources you can take advantage of to get proactive.
I believe deeply that iControl - as a means of automating network control functions - and iRules - as an incredibly smart and proactive method for processing traffic - can go a long way towards helping reduce the manual labor that buries IT staff in reactive roles. These technologies can help you get to a more proactive state where the business units look to you as a crucial business enabler.
Published Oct 21, 2004
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