Roadblock

(C) Kent Lins – https://flic.kr/p/7yqRcy

One of the common refrains in today’s business world is that “IT is a road block” or that “Internal IT isn’t responsive enough”. I had a conversation today where a comment that developers are turning to cloud providers because it can take-up to three months for IT to procure hardware for a project.
I’m not going to argue with those statements, but I want to invite you to explore a little more deeply.  Most “traditional” IT organisations have a level of inherent conflict.  The people who manage a portion of infrastructure are accountable for its smooth running and cost effectiveness.  It ‘just makes sense’ that the people who understand a piece of kit are the ones that make sure it ‘goes’.  It also means that the the infrastructure team are the ones that are held to account if the performance does not meet expectations, or if the cost is excessive.  As a result, the IT team are given every incentive to become gatekeepers of the resource, trying to prevent excessive consumption by scrutinising every request, asking questions like ‘Why do you need so much memory in your server?’ To be a gate keeper, you need some way of blocking people from going around you – like the proverbial ‘road-block’.
If you want capacity on demand, someone has to pay for it before it is needed.  In the case of the public cloud, someone has already spent the money and included that expense in their cost model.  Can’t use the cloud, but won’t authorise expenditure without an approved business project?  Be prepared to wait.
There is a lot that IT can do.  First, acknowledge the business’ complaints and second examine IT’s own processes.  The point is that IT doesn’t act alone, but acts within a business framework.  This leads to the third item IT should do, have a conversation about these issues with the finance department.