The world looks so rosy from the Web. You live on the Web all day and you can’t fathom how anyone would choose otherwise. But if you have ever worked on a growing team, it gets a bit more complex. Who is going to manage it all?

Now just think about any large IT organization that has its sights on becoming a next generation services provider.  There are already a lot of people involved. People whose jobs will be affected by any change. So what’s the approach?

Chuck Hollis is a vice president at EMC with the title “global marketing CTO.”  As executives go, he’s a top-notch blogger.  EMC is the sponsor for the ServicesAngle blog but I’ve been following Chuck for some time and he always has informative, insightful posts.

In his most recent post, Hollis explores how the IT organization is changing and the importance of looking at the issue as one about silos versus services. His post is based largely upon the Private Cloud Infrastructure Group within EMC IT.

Hollis divides silos and services by comparing traditional IT to the new IT-as-a-Service theme that is of particular interest to people these days. He compares the roles people play in IT can be divided by looking at the function of a silo approach to a services one.

In the IT world, there are any number of projects. Each has its own complexities. Each is a silo. There is almost never any “connective tissue.” He compares it to manufacturing in the old days when supplies were stacked everywhere. People had individualized and specialized roles. Today, manufacturing is driven by automated systems with consistent self-correcting processes and service level agreement management.

Sound familiar? The old IT organization has a million projects, each with its one requirements.  Shared services are minimal. Hollis:

Each new application or project got its own design and/or its own architecture.  Maybe there was re-use of similar component technologies, and maybe some of the design patterns were roughly the same — but the key point is that they did their job assuming that each application environment was designed to be implemented and run as separate entities, and not based on shared services.

This is in sharp contrast to the new version of the role, where the goal is design and architect a single multi-tenant environment that can be shared by as many applications (projects?) as possible.

Hollis writes that people in traditional IT are divided into three categories: architects and designers; the builders and operators and the product services groups.

Services Angle

The new way is one that bakes in services, platforms and foundational technologies. On top are the services people, who manage the applications for customers. The platform group supports the services team. The people at the foundation level support the most core sophisticated technologies.

Value in the supply chain is driven by the services people. The platform group are the suppliers and the foundation team is out looking for the coolest new software and hardware.

Hollis goes into a lot more detail in this post about the role of the solutions consultant and the processes that come with this system. Overall, it’s an excellent post about a world that is rapidly changing to a services oriented perspective.