I Take Back Every Joke I Ever Made About Cleveland

Yesterday, I spent about four hours (it was only supposed to be two hours) talking to a user group in Cleveland called E-STORM.  I got the chance to try out some material that I will be presenting at Storage Decisions in Chicago next week.

The feedback was tremendous and very helpful.  In the audience were IT management and IT practitioners who were quite vocal about their points of agreement and disagreement with the content I was presenting.  Some vendor sponsors of the group commented that they thought the presentations were right on point, while others (I learned through back channels) dismissed some of what I had to say as one man’s opinion — which is exactly how I presented it.

To summarize, I observed that a strategy going forward for IT came down to three things:

1. Start purpose-building infrastructure so that resources and services map to what your business processes and applications really need, rather than what equipment vendors want to sell you.  I said that such an initiative needed to respect hardware refresh cycles (progressing like waves on an beach rather than rip-and-replace) and would likely take years to complete, but it had to start now.  This is infrastructure right-sizing that maximizes value to the business and may require parting with certain vendors or at least re-thinking the popular dictum about managing a few vendors rather than technology and architecture, which has become the idiotic advice of Gartner (probably owing to its vendor-leaning business model).  In short, stop buying more features and functions than you use and stop buying one-size-fits-most technologies that don’t fit your needs very well.
2. For the first thing to work, you need a solid web-services based management story.  Applications, hosting platforms and storage need to be integrated from a management perspective if we are going to be able to purpose build and reduce OPEX costs.  I noted that Xiotech’s web services based ICON Manager has shown the way.
3. The third component is data management.  This is really the core of the strategy.  We need to classify data at point of origin and expose it to appropriate resources and services based on policies derived from business process (retention, deletion, criticality, nonrepudiability, preservation) requirements and application (access, performance, security, scalability) requirements.  Doing so in the retention tier is probably the best place to begin, the low hanging fruit for technologies like intelligent archive, but we also need to get real about capture storage too.

While I see nothing but common sense in this proposal, I recognize that it is viewed as radical by the vendor community, which makes its nut from selling more than the customer needs — and typically at a significant mark-up.  We discussed these points too.

I wish there was an E-STORM in every city.  This group enables and empowers IT professionals to share their problems, their experiences with products, and their operational insights at every meeting.  The organization also goes to bat for its own:  I was told that, following a discussion in which one member talked about his problems with vendor XYZ’s equipment, the vendor went to the person’s manager and tried to have the person fired.  Representatives of the person went to his boss and explained that the forum provided by the group is for the benefit of all and represents about the only hedge there is today against vendor bullshit.  Closing down this avenue for free and unfettered information exchange would have a chilling effect on the ability of IT professionals to learn from one another and to formulate criteria for evaluating the value and utility of vendor products.  In the end, the person was allowed to return to the group and there hasn’t been any issue since.

Another thing I like about this group is their embrace of the broadest number of technology options and subjects. Mainframers and open systems folk share ideas and alternatives without exclusionary bias. 

Moreover, while the majority of the members are IT practitioners, many participants are business managers.  They routinely engage in mutually beneficial dialog that we should be having to heal the front office back office rift that plagues too many companies.

Do you want to feel good about your IT career again, to be reinvigorated and reaffirmed in your choice to become a member of that much-dissed sect of technologists, then E-STORM may be a group you want to join.