The Difficult Position of Standards and Shared Services in Cost Containment
October 17th, 2007 by Lou
Enterprise IT environments have been slow to adopt or adapt to standards-based approaches to IT architecture that would support lowering the number operating system images, database servers, application servers and non-value added diversity in IT. However, higher orders of standardization are inevitable as infrastructure technologies mature and IT budgets are unable to sustain or scale to manage non-value added diversity.
Several key areas where standards are driving efficiencies include centralized, enterprise storage, backup recovery with NAS and enterprise SAN, mail services, home directory and departmental file services, centralized identity management with LDAP and kerberos, centrally managed HTTP web farms with standard load-balancing, certificate management and encryption.
Areas that are proving more difficult are centralized data management services and application server (J2EE) services. It is difficult to build and maintain value propositions for central IT service-based models in larger enterprises because the services require a diverse multiple technical skills to build and maintain that are generally housed in different IT organizations based on function. IT services generally do not provide direct value to an end customer, complicating the business and social interactions surrounding making a business case for these services.
Typical administrative staff are unlikely to submit to standards and related automation support without significant effort to overcome resistance to change. Standards impose bureaucratic process and automation that is generally viewed with hostility and skepticism. Both standardization and automation are typically viewed by staff as tools that reduce the expertise required to manage IT services and reduce the value proposition of the administrator.
IT Management staff is reticent to employ or leverage sophisticated tooling and impose rigid processes that cost money and take budget battles to implement and manage. The perception is that they provide no direct or immediate business value and tend to increase the skill level requirements of administrative staff.
The typical IT business environment lacks sufficient transparency and financial tooling to pin the root cause of IT costs and the business acumen or skills to construct business cases that extend beyond current models.
All of these factors conspire to make the successful development and implementation of highly leveraged, efficient shared service models extremely difficult for most enterprises. Success can only occur in the context of strong executive sponsorship coupled with middle-management teams that are able to uplift the business capabilities of traditional IT departments to provide complex shared IT services rather than merely managing server infrastructure.
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