* A five- or 10-year-old network is in severe need of a makeover
At the end of the dot-com era many companies questioned the business value of IT. One of the industry leaders who encouraged this line of thinking was Nicholas Carr who wrote the provocative article “IT Doesn’t Matter,” published by Harvard Business Review. To Carr’s way of thinking IT is a utility just like electricity and water. He stated that while you would never open a building without electricity, water and IT, those utilities do not help your company to be more competitive. What he got right is that IT unto itself does not matter, however, what he missed is that just because a lot of the components of IT are a commodity that does not mean that every IT organization is equally adept at planning and managing IT in general, or the network in particular. In addition, while technology itself does not matter, what a company does with technology matters greatly.
We believe that the IT organizations that do the best job of planning and managing their company’s network infrastructure are in the best position to demonstrate that IT does indeed provide business value.
We see a lot of companies that have not made major changes to their LAN infrastructure for the last decade. We also see a lot of companies that migrated to an MPLS WAN and now think that the WAN they currently have in place will meet their needs for the foreseeable future. In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth. Viewing the network as not needing changes would be analogous to never having anything other than a bare light bulb once electricity became a utility. In reality, the need for constantly upgrading the capabilities of the network is stronger than ever. In particular, we believe that the network must continue to evolve to meet changing business requirements and that a five- or 10-year-old network design is in severe need of a makeover.
To put that into context, consider what can happen in a decade from both a business and a technology perspective. A decade is a very long time in terms of business evolution. For example, 10 years ago Yahoo and Amazon had just been founded and companies such as Google and YouTube didn’t exist. In addition, over the last decade a number of Fortune 500 companies either went out of business or were acquired. This includes Digital Equipment, BankBoston, BellSouth, Gillette, Scientific Atlanta, and FleetBank. It is doubtful that the frenetic pace of business will relent.
The next newsletter will discuss some of the network changes that have occurred in the last several years and identify the types of enhancements that network engineers need to add to their company’s network infrastructure in order to show business relevance.
