Leveraging Infrastructure: A Game Plan for Increasing Your Team's Velocity

In this instance, you’re like the coach taking a look at the bench of players you have available. You want to play to your team’s strengths, not just individual abilities. What can they accomplish together? And at what velocity?

This is the heart of a converged architecture strategy. You’re deploying infrastructure fit for purpose, not fit for the masses. Your objective—a set of network, server, hardware and software resources optimized to work together across multiple (ideally all) stages of development to address multiple business applications.

Now is when you need to review the benchmarks from the first step against both individual components and how well they work together in a converged environment. You may have a very high-performing component or system that is simply not going to work with your long-term business goals. You may have a very low-performing application that, nevertheless, is vital to moving forward.

Making cuts—removing the snowflakes

The benefits of converged architecture to your long-term development velocity depend on having all of your components and environments within a single system. However, environments pose another challenge altogether. You have to eliminate unique environments or “snowflakes” because they have a direct impact on your development team’s velocity. Those one-off environments, software configurations, pieces of hardware or even processes that don't fit within your new, converged architecture must be eliminated.

Operating with snowflakes in place is like asking an outstanding basketball player to play on your football team; that player might be a talented individual, but unable to help your team move toward your goal. Snowflakes can slow your progress by increasing unnecessary complexity and multiplying errors because development environments don’t match test or production environments.

On the other hand, when the critical components of your network, compute and storage layers all work together, you’ll benefit from greater reliability, easier quality assurance and faster time to market—increased velocity.

It’s not always easy. You may be forced to jettison some projects that have a long history and many internal fans. But if a component doesn’t work as part of the team, it will only slow or pull the rest of your organization in the wrong direction. You lose velocity. That’s the danger of snowflakes; each “unique and special” environment, piece of hardware or procedure takes away your team effort.

So how do you manage the cultural aspects of moving to a converged infrastructure? How do you deal with the pain of “melting snowflakes” that may have a lot of support? Focus on the vision and the end game.

Going for the goal line

Aligning the project with your organization’s vision is up to you. What does your company do? What do your owners and leaders feel strongly about? What are your customers trying to achieve? Find out. Because in the end, that’s what will bring your strategy and whole team together to rally around a project of this scope.

For OCLC, it’s all about helping libraries around the world share knowledge. Our members are our heroes. They’re dedicated to helping people achieve more through education and research. So when I put together our plan to improve our velocity through implementing a converged architecture, I made sure that every part of that plan was a step toward the goals our members want to accomplish:

• Less downtime—so that library users don’t have to wait for materials • Faster updates—so that new features could improve efficiencies for our users • Increased throughput—so that requests and repairs get handled before they become long-term concerns.

Technology tools exist to achieve business solutions. Optimization means nothing unless it helps your customers achieve their goals.

Winning as a team

A good technology strategy is easy to assemble when it’s aligned with the business. You can admit that there will be challenges. Document them and share them. Provide full transparency. The openness and increased transparency of the process—both before and after—will help mitigate those concerns. There will be costs in the short term, but you can point to increased credibility and confidence in the marketplace, which leads to a stronger brand identity. Staff may be reluctant to discard particular processes, hardware or “snowflakes,” but they’ll be more productive and less frustrated in the long run. And they’ll better understand how their actions contribute to the team’s overall success.

We’ve already seen some benefits at OCLC to this strategy. We’ve had a quick uptick in overall availability of our services merely by changing processes and procedures.

As the CIO, you’re the coach. You know your players. You know the tools you have at your disposal. You know the players that work and the ones that don’t, even though they might be team favorites. If you can set a goal based on your organization’s vision, you can inspire your team through all of the hard work and achieve greater velocity, marking a pivotal change in how you manage your IT infrastructure.