Full disclosure: Dave is a friend, and a long-time colleague. He has just written an excellent book on Data Protection; hence the following musings.
As I was reading (a rapid first scan), I tried to pin down why I liked the book so much. It certainly wasn’t the editing, since I helped with that. The topic is reasonably well covered, albeit piecemeal, by vendors, industry associations, and bloggers. And while I have always enjoyed Dave’s stories and jokes, the topic does not lend itself to elaborate stylistic flourishes.
After thinking about it some more, I came to the conclusion that it’s Dave’s methodology that I value. Imho, Dave in each chapter will lay out a comprehensive and innovative classification of the topic at hand – data governance, information lifecycle management, data security – and then use that classification to bring new insight into a well-covered topic. The reason I like this approach is that it allows you to use the classification as a springboard, to come to your own conclusions, to extend the classification and apply it in other areas. In short, I found myself continually translating classifications from the narrow world of storage to the broad world of “information”, and being enlightened thereby.
One area in particular that called forth this type of analysis was the topic of cloud computing and storage. If data protection, more or less, involves considerations of compliance, operational/disaster recovery, and security, how do these translate to a cloud external to the enterprise? And what is the role of IT in data protection when both physical and logical information are now outside of IT’s direct control?
But this is merely a small part of the overall question of the future of IT, if external clouds take over large chunks of enterprise software/hardware. If the cloud can do it all cheaper, because of economies of scale, what justification is there for IT to exist any longer? Or will IT become “meta-IT”, applying enterprise-specific risk management, data protection, compliance, and security to their own logical part of a remote, multi-tenant physical infrastructure?
I would suggest another way of slicing things. It is reasonable to think of a business, and hence underlying IT, as cost centers, which benefit from commodity solutions provided externally, and competitive-advantage or profit centers, for which being like everything else is actually counter-productive. In an ideal world, where the cloud can always underprice commodity hardware and software, IT’s value-add lies where things are not yet commodities. In other words, in the long run, IT should be the “cache”, the leading edge, the driver of the computing side of competitive advantage.
What does that mean, practically? It means that the weight of IT should shift much more towards software and product development and initial use. IT’s product-related and innovative-process-related software and the systems to test and deploy them are IT’s purview; the rest should be in the cloud. But this does not make IT less important; on the contrary, it makes IT more important, because not only does IT focus on competitive advantage when things are going well, it also focuses on agile solutions that pay off in cost savings by more rapid adaptation when things are going poorly. JIT inventory management is a competitive advantage when orders are rising; but also a cost saver when orders are falling.
I realize that this future is not likely to arrive any time soon. The problem is that in today’s IT, maintenance costs crowd out new-software spending, so that the CEO is convinced that IT is not competent to handle software development. But let’s face it, no one else is, either. Anyone following NPD (new product development) over the last few years realizes that software is an increasing component in an increasing number of industries. Outsourcing competitive-advantage software development is therefore increasingly like outsourcing R&D – it simply doesn’t work unless the key overall direction is in-house. Whether or not IT does infrastructure governance in the long run, it is necessarily the best candidate to do NPD software-development governance.
