I have been deeply involved in data center management and automation for well over 5 years.
Most companies still view automation the Wrong Way™, though – and it’s a hard mindset to change. Automation is NOT about reducing your headcount, or reducing hiring.
Automation is used to:
- improve the efficiency of business tasks
- improve employee productivity
- reduce human error
- ensure consistency, and auditability
- improve/ensure repeatability
- replace “fire fighting” with planning and proactivity
- ensure an organization can pass the bus test (which disturbingly-few can)
- free engineers to work on interesting, engineering problems – not day-to-day busywork
Cringely has an article on this topic this week, entitled “An IT labor economics lesson from Memphis for IBM“.
How can a company 1/100,000th the size of IBM afford to have monitoring? Well, it seems DBADirect has its own monitoring tools and they are included as part of their service. It allows them to do a consistently good job with less labor. DBADirect does not need to use the cheapest offshore labor to be competitive. They’ve done what manufacturing companies have been doing for 100+ years – automating!
Even today IBM is still in its billable hours mindset. The more bodies it takes to do a job the better. It views monitoring and automation tools as being a value added, extra cost option. It has not occurred to them you could create a better, more profitable service with more tools and fewer people. When you have good tools, the cost of the labor becomes less important.
Any company that fails to realize that throwing more people at the problem is rarely the answer (something former IBMer {{Fred Brooks}} wrote about as a post-mortem of the OS/360 project in {{The Mythical Man-Month}}), is doomed to fail – consistently, and tragically.
And yet IBM is still in the mindset of the 1960s and raw, manual labor in an increasingly-connected, -compliant, -complex, and –cloudy world. They are still trying to solve problems the {{Risk}} way – throw a gob o’ guys at the problem, and roll over your opponents through sheer numbers.
In many ways, it is sad to see the demise of once-great companies like IBM. There’s the loss of competition, the passing of the Old Guard, etc.
But it’s also a huge opportunity for new businesses to come in, compete, and clean-up in sectors the Bug Guys can’t (or won’t) touch well.
On the one hand, while it’s sad to see the “Old Guard” fade away from a nostalgia and “Everything’s changing dramatically” standpoint, it’s a sign that progress as a whole is pushing forward when companies that for whatever reason don’t change finally fade away into the background after being obscured by sharp newcomers who are doing precisely what people need or want them to.
And that’s precisely the type of disruptive technology IBM *used* to be known for.
Guess it’s time for a new Big Blue