Ownership has several important connotations and I use it to define my take on personal responsibility for pretty much every aspect of my life.  However, it can also mean a "systems" approach to "owning" all aspects of a specific service, solution or function (I.e., I own the Data Center top to bottom).  While both of the previous "ownership" definitions are positive, there is a "darker" aspect of owning (hugging) "things" in IT. 

The audible symptoms of being Positive for Ownership Disease

I've been in IT for over 20 years now and I've seen all the symptoms as we move from one service strategy to another or make an effort to transform the technical architecture of a component of the infrastructure. Maybe some of you will recognize the following paraphrased quotes that are examples of the symptoms of ownership disease;

"We can't move to client server, there's no way it will ever be as rock solid as big iron"

"No, Mr. CFO, we shouldn't move to VoIP, it's not ready for production. Our current switch has been running without interruption for years, why take the risk?"

"Virtualization isn't production yet, when you really want to ensure performance you have to stay on hardware"

"If you want storage performance and dependability it has to be SAN, and it has to be from (three letter acronym here)"

"We can't use outside air for the data center. It's too dirty and it will increase the failure rate of our hardware"

In it's current form the disease is most often identified through the following phrase:

"We shouldn't adopt cloud, it's not secure"

The reality is that in any one of the above quotes there is just enough truth to scare the unaware executive into staying the course. What is generally not explained is lost opportunity vs. a realistic risk value. I'm sure most of us can quickly look at these examples and see the issues (I.e., how important was 100% uptime on the legacy phone switch vs. saving $2 million a year by going with a VoIP solution or even outsourcing it?).  In reality if the CEO/CFO understood the real risk value vs. the savings or business benefit, they would likely have said make the change.

You can call the above quotes myths, FUD, or lies, but in most cases it really boils down to "ownership" and the fear that not being the owner of something (that I know better than anyone else) will put my job at risk. The truly unfortunate aspect of this fear of job loss or at a minimum status reduction, is often generated or perpetuated (mostly inadvertently) by leadership.  

The visible effects of being Ownership Disease Positive

There a number of places you can look to find the visible symptoms of the disease, but the most obvious is the delayed adoption of solutions that can bring real change to your business and consequently to your IT team. While it's true that technology should never be adopted for the sake of "technology", it's also true that real opportunity for improvements in cost, management agility, and business execution can be lost when the disease strikes. Let's look at a couple current examples:

Virtualization - As a commonly utilized building block for efficient IT, and improved execution, virtualization is also the most often used tool for on-ramping to the cloud. Companies that failed to make real investment in a strategy for virtualizing their environments now find themselves behind the curve in the adoption of cloud computing.

Data Centers - Being the beating heart of the IT organization, it's strange that the data center is often overlooked as nothing more than an expensive room that we occasionally have to throw lots of money at. Lack of adoption of things like virtualization or outside air will now mean that you're stuck with a beast that is at max capacity with only one quarter of the actual space utilized. You're also stuck with an inflexible design that won't allow you to quickly take advantage of new business opportunity or to just as quickly scale back to avoid wasting cash during a difficult business climate.

Why am I Blaming The Leadership?

Who do you blame when your favorite team doesn't win the championship? You might blame the team owner, or maybe there's one player you really dislike, but in most cases it falls on the coach. So, if your IT team isn't dealing effectively with ownership disease, you have to look to leadership first. What can we do to reduce the risk? This is the tricky part, I know I don't have all the answers, but the following are a few of my recommended strategies to help protect your team from becoming infected.

Recognition and Job Comfort (or freedom from fear)

I'm a huge believer in appropriate recognition:

Example Role: In a high impact support function with lots of customer interaction, getting regular positive feedback (daily) is critical. I'm also a believer that you find the job for the person. If you find yourself perpetually having to explain customer service principles to the same person, you need to find what they are good at. If you spend too much time trying to change negative behavior, instead of reinforcing positive behavior you end up with nothing.  Why expend 80% of your energy to get a 20% solution when if you focus on natural abilities the good stuff practically happens by accident and even weirder is the employee likes their job.

When recognizing someone be sure that the message you convey is the right one. If you find yourself saying "Gosh George, without you knowing the phone switch so well, I don't know what we'd do" then you're reinforcing the wrong things.

Recognize your teams for working themselves out of a job. One of my favorite leaders used to tell me all the time "if you work yourself out of a job, I'll find you a better one" and he meant it. This particular form of recognition is the riskiest for the manager, because if you don't plan to follow through (yes that means you have to actually work at future proofing your team) you will immediately lose the trust of your folks.

Be sure to recognize individuals in the manner that they not you are most comfortable with. Yes, I know its novel, but everyone is different.

You must recognize taking "smart" risk as a positive behavior. Talking about it once a quarter isn't enough, it has to be visible and real (promotions, new job options, mentions, etc).

If you do the above and maintain regular communication (not just monthly 1:1s) with your staff, you're likely to build a strong team who is willing to speak out about waste and inefficiency, even if they're talking about their own function. The hard part is that you'll know you're successful when your team tells you when you've screwed up. When your team no longer believes that their future is tied to knowing a specific vendor technology, or architectural strategy then the natural fear we all have of change will be dramatically reduced.

Now go out there and vaccinate your team. Or if you recognize some weakness in your leader(s), then point them to this blog. You'll know your disease free when you're the first one to say "we should consider reviewing alternatives" with full understanding that the alternatives could affect your role.

Paul Sun Director of Cloud Computing for ITRI Taiwan Joins the Data Center Pulse Board of Directors
Data Center Pulse expands the board of directors to continue the goal of influencing the datacenter industry through their exclusive, global end user community.

UNION CITY, CA, February 8^th, 2011 - Today, Data Center Pulse added Paul Sun to the Board of Directors as the Asia Pacific Regional Director 

Paul Sun is the Director of the Cloud Computing Center for Mobile Applications at ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute), www.itri.org.tw. ITRI is a national research organization that serves to strengthen the technological competitiveness of Taiwan. ITRI's 6,000 employees conduct advanced research and development in Communication and Optoelectronics, Precision Machinery and MEMS, Materials and Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Technology, Sustainable Development, and Nanotechnology.

Mr. Sun is responsible for cloud computing hardware and system infrastructure research and development at ITRI
Paul recently articulated his motivation for accepting the DCP board position. "The Data Center Pulse Board of Directors is made up of an outstanding team of veterans and experts from the data center industry. It is an honor for me to join and help to make DCP into a leading, international organization. Asia is experiencing tremendous growth in the data center industry. My main goal is to focus on the APAC countries, help to foster the exchange of ideas and needs in Asia as the DCP representative."

The Data Center Pulse core membership has reached 1,850 people in 62 countries representing almost 100 different industries. The interest level is increasing and the timing is right to focus more energy on our membership in the Asia Pacific region. With Paul in place, DCP will have a representative in a position to help gather information on local issues, while also representing DCP to new potential members.

Data Center Pulse has the ability to reach a significant population of Data Center customers ranging from a single rack to some of the largest Data Centers in the world. DCP continues to search for candidates to fill the remaining board positions as well as participation in the Industry Alignment Board (IAB) and the Technical Advisory Board (TAB). To become a Data Center Pulse Member, click here. For more information on DCP or local chapter interest, please email info@datacenterpulse.org.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

About Data Center Pulse: Data Center Pulse (DCP) is a growing, non-profit, datacenter industry community founded on the principles of sharing best practices amongst its exclusive membership.  Founded in late 2008, DCP is quickly becoming an industry nexus for the explosive datacenter industry's operators and influencers.  DCP's mission is to align end users to share information thereby influencing the industry by defining, adopting and driving best practices and next generation solutions. The DCP members are the individuals that evaluate, recommend and purchase the products and services for the datacenter. They represent billions of dollars of annual purchases that drive the IT economy. Information is available at datacenterpulse.org.

As part of our partnership with The Green Grid, Data Center Pulse is assisting The Green Grid's Thermal Sub-work group by asking our DCP members to participate in the following survey regarding Economizers:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22BR53UP3GP/

Please click on the link or paste it into your browser and participate. The survey is open until Feb 5th 2011.

The argument on whether there is such a thing as "private cloud" just won't go away. Many of the big name SaaS and Public cloud players continue to publish content that poo-poo's the reality of Private Cloud.  I'm writing to suggest that the arguments against private cloud are in many cases wrong, and in some cases pure sales FUD (Fear Uncertainty & Doubt). However, before I go into my little diatribe, I want to make clear that just because I'm a private cloud believer, it doesn't mean I don't believe in "public cloud".

Some of the more common arguments on the viability of private cloud revolve around some common themes that IT has been sold by vendors for years:

• - "make better use of your internal staff by having them work on things that drive business differentiation"


• - "private cloud doesn't have infinite scale"


• - "the security of public cloud/SaaS providers is better than anything a private cloud could create"


• - "staffing for running private cloud environments will be difficult" (I thought they said there wasn't a "private cloud")


• - "public cloud offers economies of scale that can't be met by a single enterprise"

So, let's take each one of the points above and attempt to break through the FUD.

"make better use of your internal staff by having them work on things that drive business differentiation"

Who can argue with that statement? I certainly can't because I believe we all should be trying to do that. However, as IT leaders we've been told that by our vendor partners for decades and yet IT as we know it still exists. Why does IT still exist, because inherently most companies understand the "innovation & creativity" benefit of having their own IT team.  While empirically I hope for the day when most IT jobs are higher level business interaction level positions, I also understand that that day is many years away, cloud or no cloud.

"private cloud doesn't have infinite scale"

True, but SO WHAT? How often does your business need infinite scale? I've done cost comparisons of well designed private cloud implementations for large enterprise and found them to be very competitive with public cloud. In fact, they were so competitive that having a little extra capacity and having a contract for "burst" capacity was OK. If I knew that I needed 2X or more extra capacity even two or three days a month, then I would consider my options for putting that specific environment in a public cloud. The alternative is to have contracted burst capacity available.

"the security of public cloud/SaaS providers is better than anything a private cloud could create"

Generally speaking this statement might be correct. There are certain industry verticals that could argue differently (Financials), but it's probably true for many. However, does that really change the equation? The difference with internal vs. external security might be minimal compared to an unforeseen legal issue that results from public cloud dependence. In each case the business needs to make a conscious decision on the importance of their IP. If security isn't important to the business when it's internal then it still won't be important in the cloud. Now consider the fact that the worst security threats come from the inside and you can understand why just moving it to the cloud doesn't solve anything. In fact it's very much like outsourcing something that's broken. In most cases all you've really done it make the problem more intractable and created a no-win situation with your vendor.

"staffing for running private cloud environments will be difficult"

So my first comment is; if there's no such thing as private cloud, how difficult could it be to staff for it? However, all kidding aside IT organizations the world over have been building and managing complex infrastructure for years. Arguably a well designed private cloud implementation actually improves usability and simplifies the roles of many IT folks because it can bring automation to otherwise high risk manual tasks.

"public cloud offers economies of scale that can't be met by a single enterprise"

Next to the "infinite scale" point that's always used by public cloud providers, this is the next most common refrain. Unfortunately, it's not necessarily the case. In a previous comment you can build private cloud environments that offer significant scale and provide all the necessary environment, security and staffing requirements at or below the cost of public cloud offerings.  I'm not saying it's easy, and in each business use case the drivers and costs will be different, but it can be done. I'm not arguing in favor of private cloud for cost savings, for me it's more about options and the potential to bring new innovation to the business. If for whatever reason I can't utilize public cloud for any or all of my workloads, at least I can get the majority of cloud benefits by having a private cloud.

So, just say yes to private cloud if it's what the business needs, but like any IT solution don't implement it without a clear set of objectives. Do your due diligence and ensure you're bringing the right tool to generate the right business opportunities, whether that tool is a private, public, hybrid cloud, or none of the above.

In closing, I'm not trying to argue against public cloud, but rather to argue that the reality and benefits of both private and public cloud are real.

Long Live Cloud!