10 Laws of Information Technology

Hey Blogosphere, I plan to hit my blogging hard in 2011 and wanted to let you know why I’ve been off the blog grid.  2010 saw a huge change in my career.  I transitioned from being the CIO of Little Diversified Architectural Consulting to being the President of Advance2000 in Charlotte NC.  With the work that I have been doing in the area of cloud computing, particularly moving an architectural/engineering workstation to a datacenter, it was only a matter of time before I came up with a plan to move everything but the kitchen sink to the cloud.  My friends, this is law #2 in action (centralize when you can, distribute when you have to).  We no longer have to distribute our technology.  Why would I have 5 offices of IT when I could have one office of IT?  Those are the benefits of a private cloud.  So I made that proposal to my current employer (Little) and now they are my customer.  In 1Q 2011, we will be moving Little to Advance2000’s private cloud.  This includes their Alcatel-Lucent PBX, BIM Cloud workstations, VMWARE servers, SAN Storage, Helpdesk, IT engineers, and even the CIO.  I guess you can now call me a CIO-in-the-cloud or a Cloud Information Officer as I will still be providing strategic IT leadership to Little and my other customers as their CIO. 

While I have lots to blog about, I did want to complete the last three Laws.

1. Never lose data
2. Centralize when you can, distribute when you have to
3. Standardize when you can, customize when you have to
4. Simple is better than complex
5. Spend as little as possible to solve problem or achieve a goal
6. 100% utilization of IT assets always yield the lowest cost
7. Always have a “plan B”
8. If it CAN break, it WILL break
9. Volume Changes Everything
10. Do Not Be Married To Your Technology

#8 If it can break, it will break

This goes right in line with #7.  There is no perfect technology and sooner or later it will fail and let you down.  While your plan “B” is all about redundancy, failover, duplicate datacenters, etc.  Knowing that a piece of technology WILL break should lead you to craft different strategies.  The point I’m trying to make in this law is “do I even NEED this technology”?  Today I might have 10 things working together to implement some business function.  Can I do it with 5 or 3 or 1?  The fewer pieces of technology I have, the fewer breakage points I have, the better reliability I see.

Sometimes for IT professionals it’s very hard to step back and ask if you really need all this crap (pardon my French).  When I see complexity, I see problems.  I like things VERY simple and very stupid.  I can remember setting up a network and you needed to buy the circuit, then a router, then a firewall that could setup a VPN, then maybe a WAN accelerator.  And to the IT guy or vendor this seems all very logical.  But now you can buy an appliance that has all this stuff in one place.  Simple.  Now it’s getting even simpler.  Carrier hands me a private metro Ethernet circuit and I plug it into my switch.  Step back and ponder all your complex IT situations and wonder if there isn’t a simpler solution.  The less you have, the better the reliability because if it can break, it will break.

#9 Volume Changes Everything

A 10 person firm needs hardware, software, telecom, and people.

Walmart needs hardware, software, telecom, and people. 

Walmart needs the same IT stuff, just on a much bigger scale.  The “art” of IT is how big to build your infrastructure now and how much will it need to scale and how fast.  If you are a 10 person firm, you don’t want to go out and build a million dollar IT infrastructure.  One, you ain’t got the cash and two, you would be over engineering the solution. 

You want to be able to scale your infrastructure to keep pace with the Revenue you are generating on that infrastructure.

One of the main reasons for technology going down is that an unexpected load was placed on it.  Every try to hit a website after it was referenced on TV?  Too many people hitting the site buries it.

When I build systems, I use these strategies:

1. Determine what your unit of capacity is.  Is it people?  Clicks?  CPU? Memory?

1. Work with the business to determine the initial capacity.  I generally don’t believe the business units since these things are hard to predict.  I’d rather build it small with the ability to scale quickly than to over engineer it and it never gets used.

1. Virtualize.  This technology has allowed IT managers and Business executives to guess wrong about capacity.  If I have too much, I can take away some of the resources.  If I need more, I can add hosts, memory, CPU, etc. to handle the increase.

1. Don’t skimp on your technology.  Once you do see your actual capacity needs, provide the best computing experience you can afford.  Life if too short to have slow stuff when fast stuff is available.  Fast computers have a huge productivity factor on humans.  And it makes people know that you care about them.  Generally having the fastest computing infrastructure is cheaper than adding more people to the payroll to get things done.  I’m all about the fastest automation that leads to 100% utilization of your technology.

1. Realize than when you cross certain capacity thresholds, you may have to dump your old technology and go bigger, more enterprise.  I router that can handle 3 mb of through put is much different than one that can route in the 1-10gb range.  Same is true on the way down.  It’s all about right sizing.

So remember, volume changes everything!   And that volume change is NOT always up.  Sometimes it is down.  What are you going to do if you have a 3 million dollar infrastructure to support a $50MM company and that company shrinks to $25MM?  Can you cut your IT infrastructure costs proportionally without disrupting the business?  Volume changes everything.  Understand your volume and create early indicators to alert you of volume changes.  This is one of the reasons I like cloud computing.  I can dial up or down my IT needs based on the business needs very quickly and cost-effectively. 

Ideally, you should design your IT infrastructure around your volume metrics and be able to adjust costs and capabilities as your volume changes.  Once you buy that $300,000 SAN, you can’t give it back in 3 yrs after you realize you don’t need it all.

#10 Do Not Be Married To Your Technology

How many IT people think they are what they support?  How many develop job security around a piece of technology?  How many realize this is more than likely a dead-end strategy for an IT career?  How many realize that CIO’s hate it when people are married to their technology and will do everything to hire people that are not married to their technology.  Granted, to the individual this can be a little unsettling after you’ve spent years gaining those certifications.  But the market doesn’t care.  If I can solve my business problems for a lot less time and aggravation, I will do it.  Does the business owner care that all you know is Netware when most of the world in now Windows or Linux?

On the left are people that are married to their technology.  On the right is what CIO’s are really looking for.

Cobol Programmer – developer than can create custom code to make the business more competitive and only after we’re sure we can’t buy a packaged app.  We may write it in Cobol, C, C#, Java, PHP, etc.

Nortel PBX technician  - Real-time communications engineer.  Maybe it’s Nortel today but is there something better/cheaper?  Microsoft, Shoretel, Alcatel-Lucent, etc.

IBM Mainframe Engineer – Does my business really need a $1MM mainframe or can I run my business on a $100K computer?  The business will change to meet their business goals and take advantage of economics changes in technology.  They give a rip about your IT skills.  It is up to the individual to understand when the IT economics change and when a new technology might be attractive to a business.

VMWARE administrator – Provide a server, desktop, communications infrastructure that utilized 100% of the computing resources and can quickly be moved to experience 0 down time.  Maybe VMWARE is the way to do that now, but some better may be coming.  Will you embrace it?

Netware Administrator – Even if you say you are Windows will this infrastructure be needed forever?

I remember my Marketing professor making a comment on why the railroad industry is not what it once was.  Rail companies thought they were in the TRAIN business (A train was a specific piece of technology).  In reality, they are in the transportation business.  Likewise, you are not in the PRODUCT XYZ business, you are in the Information Technology business.  Don’t be married to your technology.