Mike Vizard, a blogger for IT Business Edge, has been covering enterprise IT issues for 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWeek, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review. We spoke with Vizard to get his take on the state of IT management and the cloud.
Precise: How would you compare the top three IT issues from when you first started covering the space, to today?
MV: In a way, it’s more of the same. In the ’80s, it was all about PCs, outsourcing, and packaged apps versus custom apps. Today, it’s BYOD, Cloud and SaaS. If you think about that, it’s the long march toward self-service and IT consumerization. IT is starting to figure out that they aren’t about owning the factory anymore but orchestrating services.
Precise: Do you think IT people are happy about that change?
MV: That depends on their level of enlightenment, which is not necessarily tied to their age.
Precise: What do you think the “IT department of the future” will look like, over the next one to three years?
MV: The orchestrations will take place across multiple tiers, and it will all be tied to the value of the service. If it’s not core or it’s not used much, it’s probably going to go external. For an application that’s a true business differentiator, it will likely stay on-premise. In the past, all data was managed equally but now, IT is going to need a better understanding of the value proposition. The business people will also have to engage IT. Both parties are equally responsible for the relationship, but the IT guys often get caught in the middle and may unfairly get blamed when something goes wrong. A lot of people are looking toward the new generation of “millennials” to bridge the gap, but that will take time.
P: What about size? Are smaller IT departments here to stay?
MV: Size is no longer a metric of the value of IT. The number of administrators required has scaled to levels that no human being can handle, so companies need to rely more on IT automation. IT staff will need to operate at higher levels of extraction, with more reliance on tools instead of manual labor and custom scripts for managing servers.
P: And, the CIO role? How is that changing?
MV: The CIO has to focus on getting value from information, and the metric is the mean time for decision-making in the business. Today there are three different types of CIOs–the IT guy who moved up, the business guy who moved over and the consultant who comes in from the outside. None of those models are cutting it because the role needs to bring together equally the business and IT expertise.
P: Is the Cloud really all it’s been hyped up to be, in reality?
MV: I think there is a lot of noise around Cloud but beneath it there is new technology and some new ways of managing IT. Cutting the signal to noise ratio is hard but if you look at cloud computing and draw a line in the sand, it’s about the way we used to manage IT and here is how we will do it moving ahead. IT needs to rethink the way they manage, and adopt more sophisticated tools and technologies to do it.
P: What do you find most annoying when talking to vendors about their products?
MV: Vendors are increasingly acting like they are the center of the universe and they want to control the stack. So you have Cisco, HP and IBM all trying to win the full stack in the name of efficiency and cost savings. That doesn’t reflect any kind of reality. They have an assumption that somehow or another 50 years of IT investment is going to disappear. The situation is that we have multiple platforms and they all need to be optimized. Vendors need to recognize that they are part of an ecosystem and they should do better at making their products work with others.
P: Finally, what do you predict will be deemed the “next big thing” in enterprise IT, once the topic of cloud computing has settled down?
MV: The next big thing will be getting to the business value of the convergence of Big Data, mobile and cloud. We’ll go from conversations on the latest gee whiz technology to stepping back and saying–how do all these new technologies change my business end game. The company that’s close to doing this is IBM, but so far no one is really stitching it together end to end. The industry needs more open frameworks to make it happen. Those frameworks are at best today, rudimentary.
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