In one of the talks at tonight's San Francisco Drupal User's Group meeting David from
Razortooth Communications gave some interesting advice. The audience for the 20 minute site showcase probably did not find anything Earth shattering in the presentation, but considering the focus on Razortooth's client, PARC, a long reigning Silicon Valley tech establishment, I found the advice illuminating...
"TRY TO GET THE CLIENT TO NOT USE CORPORATE IT HOSTING"
PARC's IT department, like those at many mature technology driven enterprises, does not readily abdicate IT control to a band of developers with a new idea. Just last week I was reminded of this when I presented on the topic of cloud computing to a group of IT managers at another large tech company. When I asked if they saw the relationship between developers and IT changing, one manager said simply, "They have to get their IT resources through us." His colleague then quipped, "and they wear knee pads".
With attitudes in IT like this, it's not surprising that application developers are increasingly circumspect about the traditional model of centralized IT services. Precious time lost to the traditional IT cycle of procurement, receiving, and provisioning, and the constraints of working within a corporate standard type and size of infrastructure drives developers to avoid corporate IT. The innovators among them will find other ways to get the job done. What was once jerry rigged on (mis)appropriated corporate assets is giving way to another more efficient form of ad hoc infrastructure: cloud computing services.
It's clear to anyone developing in open source communities like Drupal, that traditional IT is becoming less relevant by the day. What is less clear is whether corporate IT departments can survive the shift toward self service, pay-as-you-go infrastructure by emulating those traits within their own data centers, or if they'll further alienate developers with draconian measures or declaring virtualization to be a satisfactory compromise that ultimately does less to enable innovation and more to perpetuate the status quo.
Thanks for the mention. Don't get me wrong. Corporate IT is not in itself evil or incompetent. They simply don't have the resources to deliver on demand services the way we have come to expect in the cloud. They also are not equipped to deliver non-standard, custom, or otherwise anything not cookie-cutter in nature. Virtualization offers a great opportunity for the average IT manager to enhance service offerings and speed up delivery time, it still doesn't help if all I want is root access to a server without feeling like I am passing through airport security every time. The PARC IT, like most, know their stuff. I'm a terrible sys admin, from an IT perspective. I do stupid things like "trying things" without proper thought, and I even sometimes conduct myself insecurely, like not upgrading to a newer security patch. I even sometimes make many changes to a system before deciding I don't like what I've done and roll things back. This is where an IT person's blood starts to boil. Truly, I am like a reckless intruder on their server. The irony is that I am not hired to do systems administration, but hired as the person responsible for delivering the implementation or site build out. The Corporate IT Dept. can either work with me, work against me, or step out of the way. I prefer to work with them because they know what they've set up and will be best equipped to do things the "right way". But what usually happens is good intentions go out the window. The poor IT folks are over-worked, under appreciated, and don't get rewarded for taking risks. So then I end up having to pick up the slack because the delivery times of a blessed server instance are going to take too long. -Sigh- Just provision a server out in the cloud somewhere. Make your developer or Systems Integrator's life easy.
- Love the blog. Keep up the good work.
Posted by David J. Kordsmeier on November 14, 2009 at 05:15 PM PST #