I'm quite enjoying the View Yonder blog. The Gladiators to be freed in this case, are your top people.
Virtualization is a technology that greatly helps in the road to an IT organization that is service oriented, but as the case is made, it's not enough. There's also a process and culture transformation.
The challenge in rolling out virtualization is that you can’t do it in isolation: all of these SME roles are impacted in some way, either in the justification, design, implementation or operational phases.
At a minimum, the processes they use will be changed, and that spells trouble. Rarely in my five years at VMware did I find a cohesive system of processes that I could tweak because they were all at VMM level 5.
Instead, I continuously found subject matter experts hoarding the knowledge in their brains, acting on “experience” (read: gut feel), and not having the time to document/improve processes. Often the biggest barrier to a virtualization project was the VMware Fanboy, because that individual was awesome at what they did and didn’t see why anyone else (like Operations, or Security) needed to know about virtualization… that was Somebody Else’s Problem. Sigh.
[Editor's note: to be fair to VM admins, every other silo does the same thing. This is why a service catalog with its underlying processes is soooo crucial.
Remember, virtualization is technology, cloud computing an operational model. The rest is here.
View Yonder » Free the Gladiators!.
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