Internal politics plague net directory planners

By Paul McNamara
Network World, 8/3/98

Consolidating directories is much like closing military bases: Virtually everyone agrees it should be done, but politics get in the way any time anyone actually tries.

"Any big directory project is 80% politics and team-building and 20% technical," said Gary Rowe, an analyst with The Burton Group consultancy, which last week hosted Catalyst Conference '98 here.

The gathering of customers and vendors focused on a variety of enterprise directory infrastructure issues. The topics included how best to stem the unrelenting proliferation of directories, how to eliminate those deemed expendable and how to link what's left to minimize the expense of duplicative data maintenance.

Fueled in part by mergers and acquisitions, today the average IT environment has 181 different directories, according to industry surveys. One shop reported an astronomical 1,530. Attempts by enterprise directory strategists to corral such expensive sprawl are often hampered by legitimate disagreements and internecine squabbling over data ownership, naming conventions, directory tree designs and security issues.

The battles generally boil down to two questions, according to Larry Ketchersid, director of enterprise computing at Compaq: "Who owns the directory service, and who owns the directory data?"

"The directory service is infrastructure, and IT or your operations organization should own that service and own the management of that service," Ketchersid said. "The data is where the big fight comes in."

Real concerns

Much of that wrestling occurs over legitimate differences about who has ultimate control over particularly sensitive directory data, such as that found in legal and human resources departments.

One conference attendee cited an incident in which the new job titles of recently promoted employees were accidentally published in a directory-based company white pages system before the company's managers had an opportunity to notify employees of their promotions. The company's human resources department wasn't too happy about this incident, he said.

Other reluctant converts to enterprise directories are simply being territorial.

"That is a very human thing, and we have it," said Keith Hazelton, IT architect at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is in the early stages of an enterprise directory project. "The first instinct there is a good one, it's a survival instinct; you want to control [the data], you need to do your job.

Behavior modification

"It only becomes negative when it becomes a reflex, which has happened in some cases," Hazelton added. "However, reflexes can be unlearned."

Planning and persuasion are the keys to minimizing such reflexive opposition, experts said. They recommended:

Bringing a wide and varied collection of interested parties into the planning
process from the start, particularly in far-flung organizations with multiple business units and network infrastructures.
Establishing an accurate inventory of existing directories and a clear understanding of the methods and motivations for managing them today.
Nailing down a concrete business justification for consolidating directories that spells out the financial and operational benefits.
Getting the top brass to accept and push the plan.

According to the strategists, vendors also need to provide directory products that offer more reliable interoperability and better ways to define directory responsibilities within large organizations.

"It seems to us that one of the ways to solve the problem [of territoriality] is through [products] that allow highly granular, distributed data ownership," said Durwin Sharp, global technology architect for Exxon Computing and Networking Services.

Such capabilities would, for example, allow a human resources department to retain exclusive control over sensitive personnel data while ceding responsibility for more mundane employee information to a centralized directory.

Selling and launching an enterprise directory project is never easy, the experts agreed. But they said the potential rewards are great, as are the costs of doing nothing.

"The fact that [some] data is being entered in 50 different places may not be a problem if you're one of those 50 departments entering the data,"

The Burton Group's Rowe said. "But it sure is a problem from the company's perspective."