Fighting the Monster called Infrastructure Complexity

While organizations are busy deploying new IT projects, they must not forget that their IT infrastructure is becoming more complex and difficult to manage. Here, we dissect the various causes of infrastructure complexity and ways to combat this menace

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

It's big and scary and has its tentacles spread all over the place. There's no escaping it because it's everywhere, including your scariest of dreams. It scares away IT managers and gives CIOs sleepless nights. No we're not talking about a monster from a horror film, but something that lurks around within your own IT infrastructure. It's called the IT Infrastructure complexity monster, and it grows bigger with every new IT project deployment you undertake.

Indeed, while we're all busy implementing exciting new projects, the IT infrastructure complexity monster is gradually becoming more powerful. Unless it's controlled, it could actually reduce employee productivity and increase your costs. It shouldn't happen that one day this monster becomes so big that your IT infrastructure starts managing you instead of the other way round. It may sound unbelievable, but it's true.

Take a simple example of email. It's a real productivity tool, but if your employees forget all their other work and start checking their mails every five minutes, start sending jokes and chain mails to friends and colleagues, it becomes counter-productive. This can actually happen when they have unlimited access to email. The same argument holds true for unlimited web browsing.

Let's move to a more complex example. You give your employees an ERP solution to book customer orders, a CRM solution to handle customer complaints, and an SCM solution to track customer order shipments. They will be so busy shifting between multiple applications and learning how to use them that they will actually take longer to do their jobs (and by the way, they'll also be checking their emails every five minutes and sending jokes and chain mails to friends and colleagues!). They will also be busy with other applications you've provided them, like the Intranet to file leave applications, the usual Office Suite to work on spreadsheets and presentations, possibly an HR system to determine how many leaves they have pending (and by the way, they will be checking their email!!).

Your IT team will also be very busy handling employee complaints, running between so many servers, storage, and networking equipment, monitoring application performance, storage and CPU usage, handling interoperability issues between different applications, and doing routine administrative tasks. So everybody is indeed busy doing their work, but it's actually more about managing complexity than anything else. This is obviously not what you really wanted. It just gradually crept into your system. Now, unless it's controlled, it will chew up your management costs and force productivity to take a nose dive.

So the million dollar question is, how do you combat this monster? What should be your strategy? The answer of course is to try and extract as much as possible out of your IT infrastructure. But that's easier said than done, and in this story, we'll try to find some answers.

The main culprits
The first step to reducing complexity is to understand the reasons behind it, and there can be many, some of which could come as a surprise. While there would be many that are unique to your organization, there are some that are common to all. We'll look at the common ones.

Legacy systems
The older your organization, the more complex your IT infrastructure is likely to be, because it would have a lot of legacy systems. There would be all sorts of operating systems, all sorts of networking equipment, different service providers, and applications all over the place. As soon as you bring in a new application into the system, you're going to face integration challenges. You'll have to redefine old processes according to your setup, and establish new ones. Add to that the high rate of obsolescence in IT, and you have a lot of complex legacy to manage.

Organizational growth
Yes, believe it or not, but organizational growth is definitely one of the causes behind increased IT infrastructure complexity. While growth is good for any organization, it poses a lot of challenges for the IT department. Growth can be of two types-new acquisitions and expansion. Both have their own distinct set of challenges. New acquisitions involve inducting a new company into your system. It will have its own IT infrastructure, and a completely different set of business apps and processes as compared to yours. It will have a different work culture, people with different mindsets, and a completely different set of processes. Bringing them into your system, getting people to adopt your policies and practices, integrating their systems into yours can be extremely challenging and time consuming.

The other type of growth is expansion, wherein your organization enters new markets, opens new branches, etc. This would require putting up IT infrastructure in new branch offices, ensuring their connectivity to HO, finding skilled manpower to manage the setups there, and ensuring that your data center is capable of handling the additional load brought in by those branches. So while setting up a new branch may not be too difficult per say, it increases network complexity, making it ever more difficult to manage.

Growing mobile workforce
While a mobile workforce is a boon for every organization, it has become the bane of most IT departments. This workforce comprises of both laptops and PDAs. They're out in the field and require remote connectivity into your system. For this, you need to ensure that you have a secure remote access system in place, which is accessible from anywhere. The larger the mobile workforce, the bigger the challenge. You also have to worry about the security of your own network when these mobile users connect to it. They could be infected, and bring down your entire network. What you need are solutions to secure them. A third challenge is in ensuring the security of data on those devices. What if they get stolen? How do you ensure that data in those devices doesn't fall in the wrong hands?

More applications
When you don't have good business applications and process automation, you spend time and energy convincing the management about deploying them. But when you do have them, they pose a different challenge altogether. How do you ensure that they're integrated and work together seamlessly? For instance, you implement ERP for automating your business processes, and a CRM to handle your customers. Since customers are a part of your ERP system already, it would be only natural for you to expect that the CRM application will jel with it smoothly.

Unfortunately that doesn't always happen. The CRM application has its own unique set of features, and might require information in a format that the ERP system can't really provide. So you end up creating hooks between the two applications.

Integration between multiple applications isn't the only problem. Having so many applications is another problem in itself. When every employee has to access multiple apps to do his or her work, it reduces productivity because a lot of time is spent shuffling between them. The challenge then is to provide all information on the same interface.

More equipment in the data center
This is a no brainer. When you install new applications, you need the requisite hardware for them-more servers, storage, power, and connectivity. As you continue deploying newer applications, your data center becomes a veritable mess of equipment from so many different vendors. The number of servers increases, power consumption grows by leaps and bounds, application performance deteriorates, storage capacity rises and data is kept all over the place in so many different islands, and much more. So much so that managing data center complexity is a topic in itself.

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