Convergence: People, Processes, Policies and Products

Converged and dynamic infrastructures, cloud and virtual environments are popular themes and industry trends with different levels of adoption and deployment occurring. Although are you focusing on products, or the other Ps, that is people, processes and policies (or more here).

The reason I bring this up is quite often I hear discussions that are centered around the products (or services) providing various benefits, return on investment or cost saving opportunities.

Very little discussions are heard around whats being done or enabled by vendors and service providers, or what is being adopted by customers to tie in people, process and policy convergence.

Put another way, the discussions focus around the new technology or service while forgetting or assuming that the people, process and policies will naturally fall into place.

Will customer policies, process or procedures along with internal organizational (e.g. politics) issues with how people leverage those converged products also evolve?

I assert that while there are benefits that can be obtained from leveraging new enabling technologies (hardware, software, networks, services) their full potential will not be realized until policies, process, people skill sets and even more important, organizational or intradepartmental turf wars and boundaries are also addressed.

Converged family team

This does not mean consolidating different groups, rather it can mean thawing out relations between groups if there are challenges, establishing an abstraction or virtual layer, a virtual team to cut across different technology domains combing various skill sets, new best practices, policies and procedures in order to streamline management of physical and virtual resources.

Chuck Hollis (aka twitter @ChuckHollis) of EMC has an interesting blog post (here) that ties in the themes of different IT groups working or not having situational awareness that is worth a read. You can also read this Industry Trends and Perspective solution brief that I did earlier this year on the topic of Removing Organizational Barriers for Leveraging Technology Convergence.

Here are some additional related posts:

• E2E (End to End) Awareness and insight for IT environments
• Industry adoption vs. industry deployment, is there a difference?
• The new Green IT: Efficient, Effective, Smart and Productive
• Who is responsible for vendor lock in?
• What do VARs and Clouds have in common

What is your organization doing (or have done) to enable convergence factoring in people, processes, policies and products or is it a non issue for you?

Ok, nuff said for now

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

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