Orchestration - It Should be the Focus of Most IT Organizations

You've got the best Information Technology (IT) department in the world, your organization develops and cranks out new applications and capabilities to your customers both internal and external like clockwork – you are the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the century. However, one day you wake-up and find the IT world has actually passed by you and your company. How did that happen? Just yesterday it appeared that all was well.

Well, several things happened. Your crack team:

1. Loves to run systems
2. Loves to buy hardware
3. Loves to interact with vendors
4. Loves to develop code
5. Staffs for each new requirement 
6. Staffs to maintain each new application

All this sounds good, so what is the problem?

This is a team that hugs its environment. They want to be able to see their babies, listen to the noise of the fans, and watch the blinkin’ lights. This may also be shared by executives who want to see where their money is going. High self-esteem for the team is generated from having vendors come in and parade their wares, and doing show-and-tells of the latest feature or cool system configuration trick to corporate leadership.

In addition, the organization likes to grow. Success for many is measured by the size of the organization. So, for each new business demand, the size of development team increases, the size of the IT infrastructure increases, and the operations staff to keep it all working increases.

These two elements combined to cause the IT organization to stagnate. The organization grew too large and the culture becomes focused inwards on the tools and systems developed. Your competitors become more nimble and out execute your organization. As CIO, you see this coming, and want to take action to fix this (just as your CEO is starting to get on your tush).

There are several options you can take, but you really want to understand the root cause of the problem. To get a bearing, you engage some excellent consulting firms, and they tell you all about the best practices that will enable a technical course correction. You put the plan into action. You get your IT team trained based on consultants’ recommendations and you set expectations and goals. You wait for the changes. However, the changes do not come. What was the missing ingredient?

The problem is that the change necessary was not directly technical, but related to the overall manner in which your organization is run. The change is not technical but directional. The change is from engineering to one of “Orchestration”.

Orchestration means that you need to change the culture of an organization that loves engineering IT solutions. The culture needs to change based on new thinking and new goals as the current culture which hugs things must now embrace software and system capabilities that exist outside of their direct control (paraphrasing Obi-Wan: “use the Cloud…Luke”). For customized applications, a new development approach, based on commercial tools environment needs to be created that enables targeted outsourcing of development. The culture must understand what must be done internally, and what can be competed and placed into the hands of other companies. Engineering and development is only one of the dimensions, the other is to ensure that operations is also uses an orchestration model, tailoring its support to the specific items of high-value to your organization, and not to areas where benefits of scale are best served by another provider.

The is the approach that Netflix has taken in choosing not to continue to own and expand their own data centers, but to outsource virtually all of their IT system growth using Amazon Web Services. The basic issue was that the cost of scaling their own environment could never keep up with the cost to performance capability provided by an outsourced Cloud Services provider. In addition, it enables Netflix to focus on its real capabilities – obtaining content and differentiating their services in a competitive marketplace.

Some actionable points for an “Orchestrator CIO”:

1. It’s the Job. Get the team together and tell them that they love their job and not machines and software
2. Benchmark. More than determining comparative costs of different internal IT approaches, you need to benchmark against costs of completely alternative implementation approaches
3. Move Budget. It’s difficult to affect change if the engineering organizations control their budget and continue to do what’s comfortable. Move the money and move the organization
4. Reward. It cannot be all punishment (moving budget, benchmarking that the current approach is not cost effective, etc.). There must be a method to reward innovation and risk taking
5. Never Rest. Practice Constructive Non-Complacency