INDUSTRY

Organizations must focus on their SOA efforts if they are to benefit from greater flexibility: A new report ‘Achieving IT Flexibility’ just published by Butler Group, Europe's leading IT research and advisory organization, identifies Server Virtualization and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as two of the key technologies for organizations seeking to create a more flexible IT environment. However, whilst interest in both technologies is very high, the implementation experience is very different. As part of the research for the report, Butler Group’s detailed IT flexibility study of 80 organisations showed that 69% of respondents had already deployed or trialled a Server Virtualisation solution. By contrast, although 60% of organizations were evaluating or adopting a SOA strategy, only 8% had deployed live services. Tim Jennings, Research Director with Butler Group, and lead author of the report commented: “The outcomes of hardware flexibility are primarily cost savings and efficiency, whereas software flexibility is the main instigator of new business value. Organisations must focus on their SOA efforts if they are to benefit from greater flexibility”. Butler Group notes that the IT function must be tightly focused on providing an efficient and reliable service, which can adapt to business requirements with minimal operational and technological barriers. The reality for most organisations, however, is that these barriers are formidable, including issues such as poor-quality IT processes, the cost of maintaining legacy systems, the inflexibility of hard-coded business rules, and ineffective project management. An IT flexibility strategy therefore principally involves the progressive removal of these barriers, to allow IT to become an enabler, and when appropriate a driver, of change within the organisation. Server Virtualisation enables the application view of computing resources to be abstracted from the underlying infrastructure. Many organisations are now at the point where the large number of servers and distributed storage within the business has started to become unmanageable, from both a cost and administration perspective. This distributed systems strategy is causing a considerable number of issues for the business as a whole, such as rising costs, poor response times, service unavailability, and the inability to cater for disaster recovery and business continuity. The use of server and storage virtualisation technology is bringing significant benefits, including the creation of a more flexible pool of IT resources better able to support consolidation and optimisation strategies, along with improved workload management, and much better utilisation of hardware. The report predicts that this will become a key element of infrastructure flexibility that will see rapid growth over the next two years. The move towards a SOA is a key element of software flexibility, and will fundamentally change the way in which software applications are designed, developed, and deployed. Improving software flexibility proceeds through phases of standardisation, consolidation, and modularisation. Standardisation comes through the increasing abstraction of software, with more capabilities, such as identity management, data management, and presence, becoming part of the software infrastructure, rather than having to be coded separately into each application. Consolidation comes from the requirement to move away from siloed IT solutions, and reduce the number of individual products that provide the software functionality of the organisation. The ultimate phase of platform evolution is that of modularisation, and it is here that the report identifies the most dramatic shift in the landscape. Jennings notes that “the idea of componentising software functionality is not a new one, but it has now become the key element of software flexibility, firstly in modularising the software infrastructure itself through a SOA, and secondly in helping users to build their own modular, or ’composite’, applications running on that platform”. Pure technical skills are less important for a flexible IT workforce than understanding how to solve business and IT problems. Whilst the hardware and software infrastructure provide the foundations for flexibility, it is the people and processes involved in delivering the IT service that are ultimately responsible for the successful execution of projects and of the overall flexibility strategy. The types of skills needed must be aligned not only with individual projects and technologies, but also with the organisation’s strategic intentions relating to IT. For example, if it is intended for the IT function to be a strong agent for change within the organisation, a workforce that is recruited purely for its technical talents may not be able to fulfil the strategic goals that management has in mind – recruitment and training programmes would have to focus on developing these capabilities amongst the appropriate areas of the IT function. The report concludes that achieving IT flexibility requires a well planned and consistent approach that draws together the domains of infrastructure, software, and operations. “Whilst it is an ongoing strategy that will mature over a multi-year period, there are immediate benefits that can be realised in all these domains, and we recommend that every organisation should take heed of the principles outlined”, says Jennings. “IT flexibility will be a significant driver for competitive advantage, whilst the alternative of persisting with a disjointed and unmanaged approach will result in underperformance and increasingly unmanageable complexity”.