Transformation and the Impact to your IT Staff – Part 1
by David Merrill on Oct 15, 2012
We talk a lot about transformation in IT—transforming architectures with virtualization, transforming asset ownership with cloud and utility services, or transforming work tasks with (remote) managed services. I write and blog a lot about the economic impact of these transformations and how they can reduce unit costs. See this recent blog about 11 steps and 4 phases that can produce real unit cost reductions.
I have been meeting and working with customers in Germany and London these past 9 days, and have been reminded a few times that these transformations are somewhat dependant on the acceptance and adoption of the storage team or IT staff. Some of these transformations are technical, and are a little easier for organizations to adopt. There are also behavioral transformations that are not as readily accepted and implemented by the team (for a variety of reasons). Political changes (IT politics, not national politics) and accounting or financial changes also require a great degree of acceptance by the IT staff to become reality.
In short, your people and staff can accommodate or stonewall transformations. You cannot put in place a transformation project (for example to reduce costs) without considering the human aspect of these changes.
I will spend the next few blog postings discussing a few of these points further, and how the following transformation ingredients (below) have to consider and include human and organizational acceptance / adoption, in order to be successful:
- Storage Virtualization
- Charge-back
- Utility Computing and Consumption on Demand
- Converged Infrastructure
There are probably a few other areas that could be discussed in this context, but my work this week relates directly to these 4 areas, where we have some proven (and anecdotal) recommendations of how transformation impacts people.
