Making IT Happen

I've been quiet on the blog since Christmas, grappling with our acquisition of Trillium.

From an IT perspective this is now leading to the integration of the two teams, resulting in a huge amount of work. I am now IS Director of the combined group and my focus is on three things - quick wins, longer term integration, and not taking our eye off the operational ball in the meantime. I'm planning to use the blog to tell the story of the integration, so watch this space.

Initial impressions? Culture - in many ways similar, but in some ways quite different - if we can get the best of both we'll be fine.

An article in today's FT reports the unsurprising conclusion of some recent TechMarketView research - that corporate IT spending has fallen this year.

What I found more surprising was the finding that "80-90% of annual IT expenditure is devoted to maintenance and minor upgrades of systems installed in the last four years". I'd estimate that for us about 60-70% of spend is to "keep the lights on", and 30-40% is on new projects that add new value. I'd be worried if I thought it was only 10-20% (in fact I'd sooner it was 50%).

Gmail's outage yesterday was reported by the FT as raising questions about cloud computing. We had a very frustrating issue a couple of weeks ago with our hosted e-mail filtering service.

It seems to come down to poor change management (in this case to do with active filtering but the details hardly matter). End result was that important e-mails started bouncing.

What really struck me was the helplessness. For services we run ourselves, we can quickly look at and identify issues, not go through some painful process of trying to convince someone else the fault lies with them. As usual my excellent team dropped everything as the problem manifested itself (at 7pm on a Saturday) but there was no way we could hope for that level of response from our supplier.

More fundamentally, we spend a lot of time and effort drilling into our own team that EVERY CHANGE goes through the change committee and is carefully considered, whereas a cloud supplier can do anything without you even knowing.

Main points for me? 1 - I'm becoming increasingly wary of software-as-a-service - how can you get true accountability? Do I think that the individual made this unauthorised (by us at least) change has had the error of his or her ways creafully pointed out? Have they learned from it? 2 - I want want some money back - I'll let you know how I get on.