IT trends: Don’t get distracted by the spaniel

For better or for worse, we are the owners of a mad Welsh Springer spaniel called Charlie. Buried in there somewhere is a set of gun dog genes reflecting the fact that breeds such as this were designed to sniff out and retrieve game that had been shot down by their owners. All a bit dubious in terms of history, and quite irrelevant in the context of a family pet like ours, apart from the upshot that Welsh Springers are inherently working dogs and need a lot of walking and a regular opportunity to exercise their well developed sense of smell.

The best places to walk a spaniel are where there’s lots of open space and a lot of interesting tracks to sniff out and follow; the forest close to where we live, for example, is ideal. When you go walking in places such as this, it can be quite entertaining to watch Charlie trotting around you with his nose less than an inch in from the ground. When he picks up a scent, it’s just like he’s on a mission, and all of his actions become very intense and purposeful. Every now and again, though, he’ll pick up another scent that he finds more interesting, and there’ll be a sudden change of direction as he follows that instead.

As you are walking, the net effect of all this is basically Charlie rushing around you, sometimes off to the left, then cutting across your path to your right, and so on, but generally moving along the route at the same overall pace as you. I’ve never tried to measure it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if on a 5 mile walk, the actual distance covered by Charlie as he constantly and passionately pursues his various ‘missions’ wasn’t 20 miles or more.

So what’s all this got to do with IT progress and trends?

Well it occurred to me the other day when I was out walking Charlie that we see a lot of similar behaviour in the IT industry. Vendors and pundits tend to latch onto tracks or missions that they pursue intensely and purposefully for a while, almost as if the entire future of the industry and their customers depended on it. Then they come across something more interesting and they’re off in a different direction pursuing a different mission.

A lot of vendors in the software space, for example, latched onto business service management (BSM) as the mission a few years ago, and off they went declaring the need to focus not on IT per se, but on the services delivered by the IT organisation to the business. Then there was a switch in emphasis, and the mission became centred around service oriented architecture (SOA) as a way of achieving ‘IT Business Alignment’. Indeed some declared SOA to represent a ‘paradigm shift’ in terms of the way we think about IT, what it’s for, and how to do it. Now the chasing of the SOA ideal has been dropped and there’s a whole new mission around cloud computing, on the premise that we now have another ‘paradigm shift’ which is going to redefine the way we think about IT delivery yet again by separating the ‘what’ of service delivery from the ‘how’.

This kind of behaviour is all very Charlie like, and the illusion of purpose and progress is reinforced because so many industry analysts, journalists and pundits make a living out of tracking the metaphorical spaniel, and only pay scant attention to the actual progress of the walk.

Meanwhile, just like the person in the dog walking analogy, those in mainstream IT organisations are making steady progress along their route. Some, on occasions, have tried to follow the spaniel, and ended up knee deep in mud or tangled up in thorn bushes; the companies that tried to implement strategic SOA initiatives to ‘transform’ the way they work spring to mind here. Most, however, recognise the grand industry ‘imperatives’ as the spaniel missions they are, and stay focused on making steady progress along a more measured and sensible path.

In the IT industry ‘missions’ I have referred to above, for example, there is a common theme around service centricity, the basic idea being to regard IT as the means to an end rather than an end in itself. Implicit in this is the notion that there can often be many different ways of delivering the same capability or service to business users, with a different set of pros and cons associated with each. The trick is therefore to focus on services and service quality delivered as the pivot point for IT investment prioritisation and decision making.

This idea of service centricity has been gradually increasing in momentum among mainstream IT organisations as a natural part of evolving the role of IT within the business. Along the way, a lot of the spirit and principles that underpin some of the spaniel missions like BSM, SOA and cloud computing have been embraced. But, and here’s the important difference, if you are running an IT shop in the real world, while you obviously want to take new and enhanced ideas on board, you need to do so selectively and in the context of the complex existing environment you are working in, bearing in mind everything else that’s going on in terms of priorities, commitments, constraints and so on. To put it another way, IT leaders and others involved in IT delivery cannot afford the kind of single track obsessive behaviour that is so often advocated by many in the supplier and analyst community.

Thankfully, in most cases, the spaniel mission approach within the industry is recognised for what it is – interesting to watch, but distracting and potentially dangerous to follow. In line with this, people are also wising up to the tricks and spin often employed to create the impression of momentum around spaniel missions by re-classifying historical activity. I have had, for example, classic Citrix deployments with exactly the same architecture put to me over the years as evidence of thin client computing, server-based computing, desktop virtualisation and, most recently, desktop cloud computing. It’s surprising how often you find a lot of old familiar stuff underneath when you scratch the surface of customer stories put forward to substantiate the latest ‘developments’ and ‘imperatives’.

Those of you familiar with the work of Freeform Dynamics will know that unlike most other analyst firms, we track the walk and advise the walker, and don’t confuse the activity of the spaniel rushing around it with meaningful progress.

Not sure if this analogy works for you, but the general principle of evaluating the relevance of industry propositions to your own objectives and activity is the key message here. It’s your progress that matters, not trying to keep up with every supposed trend that emerges at industry level.

Another annoying cloud briefing

I just sat through another cloud consulting services briefing from a major IT vendor. Some of it was under NDA so can’t talk about specifics, but that’s not really relevant to the point that has prompted me to write this.

I guess my big problem is that I have spent the last ten years as an analyst looking at different disciplines and domains across the IT industry, from virtualisation and service oriented architecture (SOA) at the architectural level, through the evolution of provisioning, monitoring and management capability in operations, to Business Service Management (BSM), Business Process Management (BPM) and IT governance at the business delivery end of things. Along the way, I have investigated the relevance of hosted services and other forms of outsourcing in various contexts, and spoken to lots of really bright people from CIOs, through architects, to software engineers and operations specialists, about the interplay between all these things.

Then I hear people talking about the cloud revolution and how it changes everything. I listen to evangelist presentations talking about how [insert vendor/consulting firm name] is going to help customers navigate through this brand new world of possibilities and imperatives. And when you get to the actual detail of what they are talking about, it’s the same virtualisation, provisioning, management, SOA, BSM, BPM and hosting stuff that has been steadily evolving and maturing over the past decade, just talked about under this new ‘cloud strategy’ umbrella. And that’s the best case scenario, from big incumbent vendors and consulting firms who know that piling into enterprise customers with crackpot messages about the whole of their operations moving into the cloud (i.e. someone else’s data centre) is probably not going to be taken that seriously.

Against this background, I really wonder what CIOs, architects and those running data centres out there think of these pitches. Do they just see them for what I think they are (unless I am missing something), as a repackaging of selected elements of IT strategy consulting services? When we got down to the brass tacks slide in today’s presentation, for example, there was nothing on it as a discipline or technology domain that was less than five years old. And talking about it all as cloud doesn’t change the conversation about making it all work together effectively – we figured out a long time ago that if you start with BSM and IT governance and work backwards, you end up embracing all of the aforementioned stuff anyway.

But the evangelists and marketeers come back and point out that the game really has changed. It’s a new philosophy of computing, and IT departments need to run themselves as service providers, etc. But again, while this discussion about styles of IT service delivery might be new to some, it certainly isn’t to anyone who has moved in senior IT and business management circles, and even if cloud brings that discussion to a broader audience (which would be a good thing of it didn’t get so garbled and/or dumbed down), surely claiming that it’s all new and revolutionary risks running into a credibility problem when most of the detail looks all so familiar.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think there have been some great developments in all the areas I mentioned that have been incrementally adding capability to help build more flexible, dynamic and open systems, and break down some of the cross boundary constraints, but all that has been happening anyway over the past 10-15 years. Within this, there have been some specific developments around self service provisioning, metering and billing that support attributes often associated with the cloud bandwagon such as elasticity and pay as you go business models, but that’s only relevant in certain scenarios, and all of the other important stuff to just make IT better and easier is being overshadowed by this.

So let’s keep some perspective guys, and stop confusing the hell out of everyone by pretending it’s all new. The argument that there have been a lot of developments over the past few years means you might benefit from some strategic consulting is fair enough, but trying to sell a service on the premise that customers need to put together a ‘cloud roadmap’ or some other such blinkered and contrived nonsense – come on.


Footnote:

Comment from Jon Collins when reviewing the above: "I think some vendors are being taken by surprise by the fact that Cloud just equates to IT done right. It's a bit like the kid who runs into the bar having just found something out that’s very exciting, only to find everyone in the bar not only already knew it, but also knew it wasn’t that exciting after all. I wonder if, when the dust settles, whether the CIOs and IT managers might well be the guys in the bar, and [the vendor], the kid."