The Hub Commentary

The opening statement of the article says it all and what I heard is, “the technology and services are incompatible with our processes” and resistance to change and why I predicted the service providers will feast on data centers in 2011 in my predictions post and why I also predicted first in the list that ITIL will wane in the conversation.  Data  center staff has to wake up and smell the coffee, so to speak.  Technology is commodity, driving business is the value.  Think of it this way, when you go to the bakery do you care how they make the chocolate cake or do you just want to buy a chocolate cake?

It is no longer about the monitoring and managing of technology and configurations, that’s the commodity and those jobs are with the service providers.  The IT jobs are analytics, business performance, using technology to grow the business.  All three of my posts today are articles referencing the impending transformation that the data center must embrace in 2011 or be outsourced.

Business is frustrated with IT because IT does nothing but talk and impose “how” to manage technology on the business rather than delivering and driving services.  When you outsource (cloud, as-a-Service, take your pick), you are purchasing a service, not managing the infrastructure and how they manage their processes.  Define the contract, service expectation, reliability/performance/availability considerations and what you expect during an service impacting event.  That’s it.  The service provider is tasked with meeting that service contract and defining the processes that insure they do.

Now I also state in these conversations over and over again, many of these start-up service providers are one outage away from being out of business because they do not have good practices in place.  Yes, as a customer you should quiz and probe to gain comfort that they do know how to run the business (you notice I said run the business – not manage problem tickets), write the contract and manage to the contract.

I have several service level agreement posts and cloud service provider posts.  ITIL (I am certified) is advice on processes, not SEC filing rules for public companies.  ITIL and it’s followers will slowly fade into the woodwork if they do not embrace changing market dynamics and technologies.  The single biggest problem with ITIL that I will blog separately on is that it is still stuck in defining a life cycle, a process for the service and not how to deliver service value driving business value.   More on that another day…

2011 is the year of the cloud, virtualization, service providers, analytics for business performance and mixed /complex environments, not ITIL in the least.  Communicating performance inclusive of right sourced components as part of the service is the transformation goal.   No one will care how the data center communicates business performance, only that they do and drive value!

Are you communicating business performance and driving value or still communicating how you manage a data center resistant to the cloud because it changes a process?

Michele

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The Cloud is fundamentally incompatible with ITIL — the most widely accepted framework for professional IT management.  (Read Full Article…)