We’ve all sat in the meeting about infrastructure delivery and someone will pipe-up;
‘We need to do it faster, we need to be agile!’
And we’ve all seen the faces pulled or at least the flicker of disgust and loathing which crosses the face of most of the people in the room.
‘What do you mean faster….what do you mean agile? You can’t deliver infrastructure in an agile manner!’
And it’s funny because I think generally they’re right; you can’t deliver infrastructure in an agile manner if you carry on delivering infrastructure the way that we are expected to deliver infrastructure today.
In fact infrastructure can’t really be delivered in an agile manner unless we all become service providers but even then agility is an illusion. In order to build infrastructure in an apparently agile manner, we need to build it in a structured controlled manner out of standardised components; these could be vendor defined stacks or internally-defined infrastructure stacks.
And then we need to build them ahead of demand; you wouldn’t expect your facilities team to build a new office complex every week or if you did…
You wouldn’t expect your facilities teams to be able to bespoke a different desk and a different chair for every one; you’d be presented with a choice (or sometimes a choice of one) from a set of standard options.
I think that the move to commodity based IT is a bit like the move to open-plan offices; lots of people hate it but ultimately it suits most businesses better.
You present the business with a floor and a catalogue and tell them
‘There you go, you fill it with your choice of stuff from our choice of stuff and it’ll be here next week.’
And if your business suddenly needs some extra space; well, it’s a bit like moving into a managed office.
Furnish on demand not construct on demand.
