BI and the Chicken Pot Pie - Everyday Recipes for Business Intelligence and Performance Improvement

I can only touch on the highlights from Kusnetzky’s talk so here you go:

Anyplace/Anytime Computing: Consumers, staff and partners all expect instant access to data. They expect the network to tell them where they are, what is nearby and let them order products/services. Growth of smart phones, netbooks and constant connectivity mean we have to adapt.

Let’s just take a look at one decision- what smart phone platform to support. Organizations don’t know what platforms and devices to support so IT ends up supporting one platform over another. IT, when we look back on those decisions, is the bad guy, sometimes it was the wrong decision. Kusnetsky’s advice to IT? “Embrace your jerkdom.” Admit, yes, that was a jerk decision and then move on by asking “what do we do now to enable the right business process or decision?” You are making the best decisions based on the data you have at the time so don’t continue to be a jerk by defending bad decisions.

Changing Datacenter Infrastructure: Today’s datacenter looks like a museum. The more complex the data center the more difficult to update and manage. New thinking, let’s deal with complexity – move as many applications as possible to new hardware and virtualization to spread out workloads. Folks are thinking of hybrid –sole-owned, partner owned, third party models.

Open Source is Appearing Everywhere: When applications need to be moveable or malleable – when specifications are not provided – often in the management hosting services environment open source is accepted. In addition if you look under the covers of the exploding mobile environment you will find a plethora of open source platforms. Kusnetzky sees the acceptance in the data center and the mobile environment further pushing into the desktop where we are already comfortable with using open source for spreadsheet, browsing and other applications. As mentioned this impacts licensing and support – and has to be incorporated into your IT strategy moving forward.

Keeping Applications and Data Safe: Dealing with the cost of an audit is breathtaking and as Kusnetzky polled the audience, most of us have experienced a data security breach. Your company’s reputation is at risk. Also you have to keep in mind the refocused federal, state and local government attention on cyber tourism. A lack of security expertise means you lead with your chin – you learn from mistakes. There is a better way – IT in particular needs to ask the question “what can we do to help”? What behaviors can we build, prompt?

Virtualization is Creating a Grand Illusion: Virtualization lets you take advantage of processing power and storage to create environment for workload or function. Kusnetzky led into this by saying the industry is trying to recreate the reliable highly virtualized mainframe environment on new industry standard systems. Legacy is used as a pejorative in our industry per Kusnetzky, but we can learn from the way folks solved problems in previous generations.

He broke down the complexity of the virtualization environment for the audience which includes 5 different layers that have security and management capabilities that run through them. The components of the virtualization environment are:

Access virtualization
Application virtualization
Processing virtualization
Storage virtualization
Network virtualization

You use different strategies for different needs – not everything is optimal in a virtualized environment. For example when you need high performance computing power, virtualization won’t be your best strategy. You have to have a flexible approach that recognizes the requirements of multiple organization data driven objectives.

The 451 Group is tracking over 100 virtualization vendors and over 200 cloud computing vendors. Crazy! What is even more interesting is that very very few of these vendors approach the different components of virtualization – a lot of niche views of the world.

So what was the advice from Kusnetzky? If you are in charge of your IT strategy pay attention:

1) Virtualization and cloud are sharp instruments that could cause great pain or help a great deal when approached strategically. You have to develop a plan.

2) Do not design your world around a single vendor or tribe because you need to think in terms of building blocks. Think in terms of functions and what meets the function.

Now on to the next session – more on cloud and virtualization to come. I also am looking forward to the mobile platforms discussion because I am curious to hear more about the growing acceptance of mobility to drive business applications.