IT Perspectives

Agility is a good characteristic for companies to have, particularly in today’s uncertain market.  Companies that can move quickly to adapt to changing market conditions have a competitive advantage over those that can’t.

Unfortunately, agility is often perceived as a luxury.  Too often, we think of agility in terms of final-state: complete interoperability of elegant systems and processes – requiring years of work and significant investment. In reality, the optimal level of agility for your company in today’s environment may be closer than you think.

Consider the average person’s approach to physical agility and general fitness.  We all need regular exercise and a healthy diet, but many of us struggle when we think about the lifestyle change required to be in great shape.  We hear that we need 60 minutes of exercise a day, five days a week, with a mix of cardio and strength training.  We hear that we should eat only whole grains, cut out processed food, and we’re told that a “serving” of anything is about a third of the size of what most of us consider a normal portion.  If you are not following these and other guidelines, the changes you’d need to make to be in optimal health can seem overwhelming – and prohibitive.  As a result, many folks end up taking no action at all.

It’s too bad, because there is value in even 10 minutes of exercise a day, or in simply cutting out sugary drinks, or in a variety of other small changes.  Small lifestyle tweaks like these can improve how we feel and how we function day to day.   Similarly, improvement in a company’s agility need not require a massive business and technology transformation.  Many improvements can be achieved without significant cost or disruption.

The most important step is to identify the goals of your agility play.  I am a fan of Michael Hugos’ high-level approach described in this post with his formula for determining business agility -- he speaks of agility in terms of profitability.  If your company can consistently earn profits that are two to four percent higher than market average, the assumption is that your company is adapting quickly to changing customer demands and market factors.

For example, if your company plans to maximize profitability by focusing on high-margin offerings to your customers, you need to build a capability to support an ever-changing portfolio of high-margin products as the market evolves and the margins shift.  So what needs to happen in your environment in support of this capability?  You might charter a cross-functional team to identify and update constraining technology and processes, or you might spin up a project or two to reduce prohibitive complexity in the foundation of your IT environment, or you might offer streamlined collaboration tools.

While there are many options to consider, remember that not all processes will need to be rationalized, and not all technology complexity will need to be removed from your environment before your agility increases – baby steps optimized to support the relatively narrow task at hand will allow you to be agile in the way your company requires to maximize profits as the market shifts.

It’s the corporate equivalent of committing to 10 pushups a day during tank-top season.

Think about where small changes and investments can make a big difference to your corporate agility, and I’ll do the same. Let me know if you've got other suggestions that worked at your company.

Meanwhile, I’m going to lace up my walking shoes and take a few trips around the block.

This week, Reuters columnist Eric Auchard, penned an opinion piece on the future of Dell and what role virtualization will play in that.

In the blog post, Auchard says "More than other large computer vendors, it [Dell] has embraced "virtualization" technology that lets many big tasks run on the same machine rather than separate ones.

We indeed have been very focused on enabling our customers to virtualize their data centers as evidenced by recent announcements. But, not only are we talking about this with our customers, but we're also eating our own dog food. We have virtualized a significant percentage of our data centers and have seen dramatic savings - in the neighborhood of US $29 million.

Take a look at the video below, which features Buddy Holtendorf from Dell's Global Platform Services team in Dell IT. Buddy describes Dell's "virtual first" methodology in which every new deployment is looked at through a virtualization lens. Dell's internal infrastructure has about 5,800 virtual machines on the guest side with about 500 hosts. If you're interested in more details on what Dell has done, take a look at this case study.

On this same topic, Gartner earlier this year wrote an in-depth report entitled "The Great Virtualization Dilemma of the Next Decade: What You Need to Know" that outlines some of the challenges and strategic issues that IT personnel face. The report gives specific advice on how to deal with issues such as heterogeneity, resource and performance optimization, and the increasingly fragmented tool market. Take a minute to download this report and give it a read.

As CIOs and other corporate leaders adapt to serve customers in ever-changing markets, large-scale technology decisions are becoming increasingly difficult to make. Shifting demands of the market (and customers) are often pitted against the pressure to decrease costs and optimize portfolios.  Many tech leaders end up in a reactionary mode, attempting to support their business partners’ shifting needs – the IT-equivalent of swinging at every pitch, or every IT project that comes up for review.

While there is no shortage of Dell offerings to solve the wide range of problems CIOs face, it may not always be obvious why, or if, these offerings are optimal for your company at this point in time.  So what are the sorts of things to consider as you contemplate a significant investment in technology –- and how can you recognize a hitter’s pitch?

A good first step is to identify your underlying issue(s) and plan investment around them. Is your business suffering from lack of agility and/or high operating costs?  Low customer satisfaction and/or shaky sales pipeline?  Prioritizing pain points by theme will allow you to focus your largest investments in high-value areas, and reap the rewards of a targeted tech investment strategy.

For example, if cost savings are of utmost importance, you’ll look for levers that can be pulled in the short term and strategies to be adopted in the long term to achieve notable cost savings.  Depending on your short- and long-term goals, you might focus on quick-wins like server consolidation projects, adoption of cheaper/smarter storage solutions, consumption of services that can roll-out quickly and provide immediate cost relief and customer value, and the like. Or you might focus on foundational investments like green IT initiatives, data center optimizations, event-driven architectures, data-driven analysis, and so on.

I read an article on ZDNet-Asia that quotes a Gartner analyst (Andy Rowsell-Jones, Gartner's vice president and research director) in which he suggests a company's CIO should learn to "speak the CFO's language" in order to get approval for IT projects.  Great suggestion – but with all due respect to Mr. Rowsell-Jones, I'd suggest that CIOs, and all IT people for that matter, need to focus on understanding and contributing to the business objectives of the company rather than focusing on getting IT projects approved.  Although there is much more to Mr. Rowsell-Jones’ position on the matter, this article is a great illustration of how our IT colleagues can easily get absorbed navigating the system rather than embracing our calling to be an asset to our companies.

In a series of blog entries, we’ll explore a few investment themes that emerge in response to common business challenges, and we’ll review approaches to connecting the dots between available technology solutions (Dell and otherwise) and your area of investment focus and desired timeline. 

For now, I'd encourage you to start thinking about the underlying themes in your business that must be addressed - this will help you isolate areas for investment and know when to swing or take a pitch.

If you have specific pain points you'd like me to discuss, let me know.