All Posts in Shadow IT

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Are you tired of the phrase “perfect storm”?

Me too. But tired or not, one is hitting IT right now. Several interconnected trends are affecting the business world in ways that will … and should … radically redefine IT’s role. Among them:

Cloud 3.0

Cloud 1.0 was playing with cheap or free stuff, notably but not limited to Amazon Web Services. Because Cloud 1.0 services were cheap or free, the IT pundit class concluded Cloud computing was going to be dramatically more economical than owned infrastructure.

Cloud 2.0 consists of (present tense because it’s going strong) important but standalone systems. Salesforce is an example. While Salesforce is integratable, most Salesforce implementations were and are standalone “islands of automation” to use a quaint phrase from a bygone era. Cloud 2.0 wasn’t/isn’t cheap or free.

Cloud 3.0 is serious enterprise-class computing that makes use of Cloud services and architecture. By serious, I mean it has the same characteristics as projects IT is accustomed to dealing with. Cloud 3.0 provides systems that are integrated into the rest of the applications and information portfolio; they make use of the enterprise directory service for identity management; and they’re subjected to the same rigorous software quality assurance and change control protocols as systems that run on owned infrastructure.

IT could ignore Cloud 1.0 and Cloud 2.0. Cloud 3.0? IT will be neck-deep in Cloud 3.0 projects whether it takes the lead or is dragged into them, kicking and screaming.

Shadow IT

Shadow IT isn’t so much a second, separate trend as it is the flip side of the Cloud coin.

Gartner has famously predicted that by 2017, marketing departments will have bigger IT budgets than IT departments and marketing isn’t the only department outside IT that buys information technology independently. Sales is an obvious example, routinely signing contracts with Salesforce.com without asking IT’s permission first (see Cloud 2.0, above).

Here’s what’s rarely mentioned: Companies have invested large amounts of time, effort, and political capital developing IT governance processes. Depending who you ask and after how much beer, this is either because companies want to gain maximum business advantage from their investments in information technology, or because business executives don’t trust IT do anything other than play with the latest and greatest shiny ball unless the rest of the business supervises it closely.

So here’s the question: Given that Marketing doesn’t, in most companies, have a strong reputation for tight cost discipline, does anyone really think CEOs are going to give Marketing, or any other department for that matter, a free rein when it comes to its non-IT IT spending?

Me neither.

The digital enterprise

Okay, okay. Yes, this is one of those so-visionary-it-might-be hallucination buzzphrases. Except that, shorn of its buzzphrasey trendiness there’s a lot of current reality behind it. In particular, there’s the rise of smart products that don’t keep their smarts to themselves — products that constantly collect data and communicate it to what I sure hope we soon stop calling “big data” repositories through what I hope even more we stop calling “the Internet of things.”

From IT’s perspective, this is a big, big deal, because …

Back in the day, most companies that sold technology products kept internal IT and product-development IT separate. Merge them and either the company would soon consist of nothing but cobbler’s children as product development sucked all of the priority out of internal support projects, or products would become second-rate as internal priorities had the opposite impact.

That worked when product IT and internal IT had no technological point of contact.

But smart products that send data to internal databases for use in customer support and marketing analytics are seriously smudging the line separating internal and external IT.

Politically, CIOs might win biggest by sitting this dance out, watching product development, marketing, and customer service duke it out in the silo wars, then riding in as the white knight that can pull it all together. After all, most business executives value solutions much more than they value prevention.

Another reason to wait on the sidelines: The most obvious organizational solution for all this — a dramatic expansion of central IT — would look like empire building should you propose it.

But waiting on the sidelines is the opposite of leadership.

Fortunately, there’s a better solution. Unfortunately, we’re out of space for this week.

So stay tuned.

* * *

Six years ago I published one of the most important columns I ever wrote — “The portal,” describing a better way to think about personal computers, although if I wrote it today I’d add tablets and smartphones.

And eighteen years ago, in InfoWorld’s “IS Survival Guide,” I took my first shot at the difference between productivity and effectiveness.

Comments

|In: Cloud|Last Updated:

I don’t get it.

Amazon will now sell businesses virtual PCs for $35 per month. I’m trying to figure out how this makes sense.

Let’s run the numbers. You can buy a pretty decent desktop computer … from Amazon, to take one variable out of the comparison … for $400. Plus a monitor, keyboard and mouse, but they’re the same either way — a wash.

For the Amazon offering, unless you’re planning to run it directly in your frontal lobes you’ll need a cloud client to run it on. Typical cloud clients run around $350.

Imagine you expect the desktop PC to last 3 years … a typical rotation … but because you’re using a cloud-based PC you expect your cloud client device to last twice as long. That’s probably too generous, but I’m a generous guy.

The raw numbers say that over six years you’ll spend $800 for a traditional PC. For the Amazon alternative you’ll spend $350 + 12*6*$35 = $2,870.

Presumably, what you get for the additional $2,000 and change … $333 per year … is …

I don’t get it. Because you’ll still have to handle software installations, user support, and so on. The big benefit is that if a cloud client dies, there’s no disruption when you replace it. (And, by the way: Dear Microsoft … this is 2013 and it’s still an awesome pain to migrate from one PC to another. Why haven’t you fixed this yet? Love, Bob)

Probably, this is the wrong comparison. What we should be comparing Amazon Workspaces to is running your own VDI infrastructure. It’s a much more plausible comparison, because without Amazon you need to server capacity to run the virtual desktops, and storage capacity for user data.

Enter a nice piece written by Network Computing’s Art Wittmann earlier this year (“Calculating the True Cost of VDI,” 4/15/2013). Wittmann’s bottom line comes to $900 to $1,000 to provision a cloud-client system. The picture is complex enough that I’m not going to try to put a side-by-side comparison together.

Building a side-by-side comparison is complicated by quite a few little details, like how many times you’d replace the data center hardware over the six-year span we’ve allowed for VDI desktops (if it’s every three years add $320 per desktop for this, spent in year 4 of the cycle), and whether you or Amazon will upgrade the desktop OS, and if it’s Amazon whether the upgrade license is at no additional charge.

If you’re running low on space or AC, factor that in too.

Oh, one more quibbling little detail: If it’s your server, your local users get to operate at wire speeds. If you use Amazon’s service they’ll share Internet bandwidth. Yes, VDI is pretty efficient in its bandwidth use. You still need to determine whether you’d need to beef up your network.

Or add to it, because now that everyone is completely dependent on the Internet connection, you’ll need two, from two different ISPs, connecting to two different points-of-presence at opposite sides of your building. You should have this already, of course, and if you don’t, stop reading right now and make the proper arrangements.

I’m far too lazy to perform the detailed analysis, although if you’d like to put one together and send it my way I’d be happy to share it with the rest of the KJR community.

My guess is that managing your own VDI will win, but not by a lot.

But what this really points out is that after all these years of VDI being touted as the just-makes-sense alternative to putting real PCs in front of employees, the raw economics still favor the real PC.

VDI’s “value proposition” (if you aren’t an initiate: “Why you might want to buy it”) has always been the same. It isn’t hard cash. It’s headache reduction.

But reducing IT’s headaches doesn’t improve revenue, costs, or risks.

It’s long past time for a hard-edged look at the trade-offs between using VDI-provisioned desktops and real PCs. Not just how the costs compare … I trust regular KJR readers don’t need me to explain why total cost of ownership is such a useless metric yet again … but how they compare with respect to the business benefits they enable as well.

But this will probably prove impossible, because much of the benefit of real PCs comes from “shadow IT.”

It’s something most IT departments still try to stamp out, because IT only sees the headaches it causes. Its benefits are, by definition, hidden in the shadows where they’re devilishly hard to dig out.

Comments