Mr Hamel states that organizations’ decision-making will be more peer-based; the tools of creativity will be widely distributed in organizations; ideas will compete on an equal footing; strategies will be built from the bottom up; and power will be a function of competence rather than of position.
The current tools needed to manage a large data center reflect the distributed view that Mr Hamel has of how people management, in particular, will evolve. This distributed model currently burdens the data center manager with problems of interpreting the value of information that comes from many different sources.
This is because fast decision-making in a de-centralized structure requires the receiver of the information to have complete trust in the source of the data. In Mr Hamel’s view, this trust is the basis for competency-based power. In other words, this approach enables the person who has the correct skills to receive the information and make decisions based upon it, irrespective of their hierarchical position within the organizational structure.
Therefore, if we consider the data center as an amalgam of peer-based assets, the issue to be resolved is how does all of this data get shared with the relevant target. An example of the practical embodiment of this would be so that the change manager can decide to implement the latest operating system patch or not, based on trusted information of its impact, and he does not need to obtain authorization from a committee to proceed.
Currently, in data center management, the CMDB is considered by some as the answer to meeting these new challenges. However, the CMDB is a step, albeit an important one, that provides information but does not deliver the trust in data needed to make faster decisions, or enable a competency-based structure for decision-making to be deployed.
Application mapping vendor Tideway Systems has recognized the need to develop trust in corporate data so that organizations can manage complexity and enable responsibility for decision-making to become more de-centralized. To achieve this for large complex issues, Tideway Systems has developed a new pattern-based language that allows the large volumes of data generated within a data center to be correlated so that information can be directed to the relevant decision-maker, who can have confidence that the data is complete and accurate.
Data center management has reached the tipping point for the very large and complex data centers, where the volume of data has increased significantly and the pressure to enable decisions to be made at the point best suited to making them (i.e. competency-based management) have combined together to create a problem that existing tools and techniques cannot solve, therefore we contend that the management tools used must evolve.
This transition from current data center management capabilities to those needed in the future will not be a revolution but more an evolution, and advances such as the pattern language represent the small changes that can be deployed today, helping organizations to ensure they obtain trusted information from a CMDB and move the organization forward towards Mr Hamel’s vision of future management practices.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
