The siloed vendor offerings

Insightful analysis by consultants Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler, plus links to the latest WAN news headlines

In past newsletters we commented on the fact that IT organizations are typically organized around silos of technology. We recently received some e-mail from our readers who acknowledged the fact that IT organizations are siloed, but also drew our attention to the impact of the silos that surround vendor offerings. We will use the next few newsletters to talk about those siloed vendor products and services and to begin a discussion of cloud computing.

When we talk about siloes in the IT organizations we mean that the various sub groups within IT do not share the same terminology, goals, tools and processes. The word service is a good example of how groups inside of the IT function do not share terminology. If you ask five IT professionals what they mean by the word service, you may well get five very different answers. Silos are not inherently bad. They are bad, however, when they increase the amount of time it takes to install a new WAN link or to troubleshoot a problem. They are also bad when they increase the difficulty of designing an end-to-end system that performs well and can be easily and effectively managed.

As mentioned, some of our readers have pointed out that vendor offerings are at least as siloed as IT organizations. One of those readers is Dennis Hollarn II, a Senior Network Analyst at Erie Insurance. Dennis wrote that, “It is a very demanding time and it seems the complexities of many new technologies can at times make the ability to architect and monitor them a daunting task. It is my opinion that the people/organization silo scenario you have mentioned in your papers also exists in the IT vendor market. Even though there are standards within each area of technology there seems to be a lack of ‘system’ standards if you want to call it that. What I mean is it is getting ever more difficult to know how to fit the various components of IT systems together into a synergistic system.”

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In past newsletters we commented on the fact that IT organizations are typically organized around silos of technology. We recently received some e-mail from our readers who acknowledged the fact that IT organizations are siloed, but also drew our attention to the impact of the silos that surround vendor offerings. We will use the next few newsletters to talk about those siloed vendor products and services and to begin a discussion of cloud computing.

When we talk about siloes in the IT organizations we mean that the various sub groups within IT do not share the same terminology, goals, tools and processes. The word service is a good example of how groups inside of the IT function do not share terminology. If you ask five IT professionals what they mean by the word service, you may well get five very different answers. Silos are not inherently bad. They are bad, however, when they increase the amount of time it takes to install a new WAN link or to troubleshoot a problem. They are also bad when they increase the difficulty of designing an end-to-end system that performs well and can be easily and effectively managed.

As mentioned, some of our readers have pointed out that vendor offerings are at least as siloed as IT organizations. One of those readers is Dennis Hollarn II, a Senior Network Analyst at Erie Insurance. Dennis wrote that, “It is a very demanding time and it seems the complexities of many new technologies can at times make the ability to architect and monitor them a daunting task. It is my opinion that the people/organization silo scenario you have mentioned in your papers also exists in the IT vendor market. Even though there are standards within each area of technology there seems to be a lack of ‘system’ standards if you want to call it that. What I mean is it is getting ever more difficult to know how to fit the various components of IT systems together into a synergistic system.”

We were going to respond to Dennis and point out some of the newsletters that we had written on the topic of architecture and point out that the goal of an architecture is to assist IT organizations to fit the various pieces together into a synergistic system.

We didn’t point that out to Dennis for a couple of reasons. One reason is that as we expressed in previous newsletters, many IT architectures fail to live up to their goal. The second reason is that Dennis also brought up the use of cloud computing as a possible solution to the problem.

We have not written very much about cloud computing and so will use the next two newsletters to begin to address that large, somewhat vague topic. In the meantime, we would like to hear from you. What is your opinion of cloud computing? More hype? Great value today? Great promise, but still to early for real results?

For further discussion of Cloud Computing see Jim's blog.

Read more about lans & wans in Network World's LANs & WANs section.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.