All posts by Journey to the Cloud

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech News

Tech News Recap for the Week of 3/31/2014

 

Here’s a quick IT news recap from around the web for the week of 3/31/2014. Enjoy!

Would you like to learn how you can cut costs by transforming your IT Department into a broker of IT services? Download this whitepaper to learn more.

 

Featured, IT Management, PMO, Project management

Are You Ready for a Project Management Office? Part 2 – Players and Pitfalls

By Nancy Mather, Director of Professional Services Operations, PMP

This is the second part of a series. Catch up with part 1 here.

Once you’ve made the decision you’re ready for a Project Management Office (PMO), it’s time to think about who you need for players. If you’re on the fence about a hire due to uncertainty of sustained business needs to support the hire, or due to the fact that you have found someone that might not have the exact experience you are looking for but you believe is the kind of person you want on your team, consider a contract position instead of a permanent hire. More than half of all PMO’s use contracts resources to manage projects.

Consider the reporting structure and if the PMO will manage the project managers. It’s important to try and keep PMO resources unified within the group. That doesn’t mean that there can’t still be a dotted line reporting structure to groups outside; however, try to keep the PMO together.  The team will gain great value from the consistency that comes from being part of a PMO. In addition, it will make it easier to keep processes and best practices consistent. Project Management team meetings can be a great forum for the team to share lessons learned.

Be on the lookout for functions that might take Project Managers away from their primary focus of project management. Project Managers are known to be detail-oriented and organized by nature. This can at times make them a catch all in the company for a variety of responsibilities, some of which might not need to belong with them. This could include things like:  resource scheduling, contract creation, negotiation, or other general administrative tasks.

Over the years, we have gone through my renditions of what functions our PMs hold.  Some functions we’ve moved to centralize, and others we have decentralized. Centralizing helped us increase efficiency in areas around contract writing and resource scheduling, and it decreased efficiency when it came to centralized billing. The key is to be open to change and recognize that there is not a one size fits all answer.

If project managing is not the primary role of the person that’s deemed the project manager, you could be setting yourself up to fail. We often see examples of IT professionals that wear a project management hat as needed in their organization. While some can do this effectively, others can get more hands on than needed and take on more of the leg work than needed. Just because someone is good in one role, it doesn’t mean they will automatically be a good project manager.

Executive buy-in is also a must. Without executive level support of the PMO, your PMO could be doomed to fail by not being valued or being dismissed as an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. There must be executive buy-in that believes in the fundamental value of a PMO. In order for this to happen, the PMO must be aligned with the organization’s strategy. If the PMO doesn’t understand the company’s key drivers, it won’t contribute to the value.

Continual improvement is also key.  While a PMO should use best practices for consistency, it’s important to make sure that these practices are continually being looked at for refinement and continuous improvement. The PMO must be agile in the event that the needs of the business change.

By considering these things up front, it will help ensure that you are on the right path to successfully establishing a PMO. As always, our Project Management team is available to offer you professional advice any time!

 

 

Amazon, cloud brokerage, Cloud computing, Featured, Public Cloud

Google & Amazon Cut Prices & Microsoft is Next. Why Not Take Advantage of Them All?

By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud

 

There’s been a lot of talk this week about price cuts coming from cloud providers. First Google announced several price reductions for most of its cloud services. In response, Amazon announced a round of price cuts as well. This marked the 42nd time AWS has reduced prices since 2006. This means that Microsoft Azure will most likely get in on the action as well. Last April, Microsoft pledged that it would match any price drops from AWS. In early 2014, Microsoft did just that when it lowered prices to match a reduction made by Amazon. TechCrunch has nice write-ups on the specifics of the Google & Amazon  price reductions.

Obviously price cuts are beneficial to organizations using these platforms, but wouldn’t it make sense to take advantage of price cuts from multiple providers at the same time to maximize cost savings and performance? What if you moved different applications to different clouds – or even different parts of an application to different clouds?

Let’s say you have some applications for your database that require high-end performance, and you’re willing to pay more for performance.  But if you use a more expensive provider exclusively, you may be overspending in other areas that do not require as high performance. So, instead of running all your apps on the same provider, you could move some, say, commodity web-based applications that don’t require as much performance to the cheapest provider. You also have to keep in mind that the best option could be to keep the application on premise. This is only one example. John Dixon wrote a great ebook about the evolution of the corporate IT department and gives a more in depth look at the “which app, which cloud” philosophy that I highly recommend downloading.

So why don’t more companies split applications across multiple cloud providers? It’s simple; it’s complex and painful to manage. Furthermore, price cuts can happen at the spur of the moment so you need to be able to take advantage in real time to maximize savings.

This is where you need a management platform like GreenPages’ Cloud Management as a Service (CMaaS) Brokerage and Governance offering. CMaaS gives you the ability to match the right applications to the right cloud providers and compare the true cost of running your resources at a CSP before even placing an order. The platform eliminates cloud sourcing complexity with a central portal where business and IT users can quickly and easily aggregate, procure, and pay for cloud solutions. It answers the “which app, which cloud?” question across both internal private and public cloud environments.

Has your organization looked into spreading different applications across different clouds? What are your thoughts?

 

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CIO, Featured, Miscellaneous IT

Tech News Recap for the Week of 3/17/2014

 

In case you missed it: Here’s a quick recap of tech news and articles from the week of 3/17/2014!

 

 

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Featured, IT Management, Project management

Are You Ready for a Project Management Office? Part 1 – Where to Start

By Nancy Mather, Director of Professional Services Operations, PMP

As modern IT continues to transform, so must traditional project management approaches and methodologies. Conversations have shifted away from a sole focus on technology to more of an emphasis on business vision and outcomes creating an additional layer of complexity as new stakeholders become involved in the process.

A Project Management Office (PMO) is a centralized group set up for the purpose of implementing project management expertise across an organization. At its best, a PMO benefits an organization by providing accountability, visibility, a sense of discipline, and ensuring that projects are completed successfully, within budget, and on time. At its worst, a PMO is viewed as a police force, roadblock, and layer of red tape that slows down progress while not providing any value.

How do you know if you need a PMO? When GreenPages made the decision to implement a PMO, it was a natural progression based on the size that our project management team had reached and the number of projects that were coming in per year. We had reached a point where stratification of the team was necessary. The one size fits all role of “Project Manager” was no longer effectively representing the varying levels of experience across the team. In addition, we had collected a significant amount of collateral from templates to best practices, so for us the formation of a PMO was a natural progression in the evolution of the department.

One of the questions we often hear from our customers, is how do you create a PMO and where do you start? I’m a big believer that it is important to start with the basics. Define your mission, vision, and goals. Formally defining the role of the PMO can be a challenge, however defining where you want to go will help ensure you are on the right path to get there. Consider a value proposition for the PMO. It would be something as simple as projects delivered on-time, on-budget, with higher quality.

Define your timelines with phases. After changes are made, take time to breath to understand the effects of those changes. This will allow you to make refinements as needed. Define what effectiveness looks like and how it will be measured in the future. This is where the vision and goals come in to effect. Defining what you want to achieve will help you steer the course.

It’s also important to perform a gap analysis of where you are today and where you are trying to go. It is important to look at the staff that you already have and begin to think about the roles you envision them in under the PMO. It’s also important to think about who will manage the PMO, and if there will be layers of management within it. The formation of a PMO can be an opportunity to create a management career path for those on the team that want it and are ready for it.

Develop a training program for the PMO. Consider a program that is tiered and on-going. At the onset, a focused training on tools and process is necessary.

Determine the new project funnel flow. Where will the project that the PMO will be responsible for come from? Determine how many projects you believe each person can reasonable and effectively manage. Will you be able to control the flow of project to manage to that level? It’s critical to identify key metrics and watch trends closely that effect your staffing needs. Weekly one on ones with staff are valuable to understand what the team has on their plates and to understand current bandwidth.

Stay tuned for part 2: Are You Ready for a Project Management Office? Players and Pitfalls

 

Free Whitepaper: The Business Savvy CIO

 

 

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech News

Tech News Recap for the Week of 3/10/2014

 

In case you missed it: Here’s a quick recap of tech news and articles from the week of 3/10/2014!

 

 

To keep up with tech news and updates throughout the week follow @GreenPagesIT on Twitter! If you’re looking for additional resources here are some whitepapers:

 

 

applications, Internet of Things, Miscellaneous IT

The Internet of Things – There’s no stopping it!

 

This post was written by ConnectEdu CTO Rick Blaisdell and was originally posted on http://www.rickscloud.com/the-internet-of-things-theres-no-stopping-it/ . You can follow Rick on Twitter @RickBlaisdell

 

“The Internet of things is coming, be the disrupter or prepare to be disrupted. There’s no stopping it” said Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC, during this year’ Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The term “Internet of Things”(IoT) emerged as a buzzword over the last year to describe the phenomenon of network-connected sensors incorporated into devices that in the past were standalone appliances. Basically, the Internet of things is a scenario in which objects, animals or people are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to automatically transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.

There are many specialists that say just about every business will become an IoT business, and the benefits are so profound that it is inevitable that this will happen. By connecting devices over the Internet and wirelessly over mobile networks, companies can manage a wide range of new services for their customers. This is why Google announced in January that it would pay more than $3 billion for Nest’s smart thermostat and smoke alarm technology.

The numbers being forecasted for the Internet of Things are truly spectacular. BI Intelligence finds that the number of everyday and enterprise devices that will soon be connected to the Internet — from parking meters to home thermostats — will be huge: 1.9 billion devices today, and 9 billion by 2018, roughly equal to the number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers, and PCs combined.

In the consumer space, many products and services have already crossed over into the IoT, including kitchen and home appliances, lighting and heating products, and insurance company-issued car monitoring devices that allow motorists to pay insurance only for the amount of driving they do.

Here are some of the top business-to-business and government applications for the IoT:

  • Connected advertising and marketing – How would Internet-connected billboards look like? This will sure be one of the top three IoT categories, along with smart factories, and telecommuting support systems.

  • Intelligent traffic management systems – Machina research sees $100 billion in revenue by 2020 for applications such as toll-taking and congestion penalties. A related revenue source will be smart parking-space management, expected to drive $30 billion in revenue.

  • Waste management systems – According to BI’s research, in Cincinnati, residential waste volume fell 17% and recycling volume grew by 49% through use of a “pay as you throw” program that used IoT technology to monitor those who exceed waste limits.

  • Smart electricity grids that adjust rates for peak energy usage – These will represent savings of $200 billion to $500 billion per year by 2025, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.

Finally, what we need to keep in mind is that the Internet of Things is a vision, it is being built today. The stakeholders are known, the debate has yet to start.

Photo credit: www.switchscribe.com

Cloud computing, Featured, ITaaS, Public Cloud, SDDC

The Big Shift: From Cloud Skeptics & Magic Pills to ITaaS Nirvana

By Ron Dupler, CEO GreenPages Technology Solutions

Over the last 4-6 quarters, we have seen a significant market evolution, with our customers and the overall market moving from theorizing about cloud computing to defining strategies and plans to reap the benefits of cloud computing solutions and implement hybrid cloud models. In a short period of time we’ve seen IT thought leaders move from debating the reality and importance of cloud computing, to trying to understand how to most effectively grasp the benefits of cloud computing to improve organizational efficiency, velocity, and line of business empowerment. Today, we see the leading edge of the market aggressively rationalizing their application architectures and driving to hybrid cloud computing models.

Internally, we call this phenomenon The Big Shift. Let’s discuss what we know about The Big Shift. First for all of the cloud skeptics reading this, it is an undeniable fact that corporate application workloads are moving from customer owned architectures to public cloud computing platforms. RW Baird released an interesting report in Q’4 of 2013 that included the following observations:

  • Corporate workloads are moving to the public cloud.
  • Much of the IT industry has been asleep at the wheel as Big Shift momentum has accelerated due to the fact that public cloud spending still represents a small portion of overall IT spend.
  • Traditional IT spending is growing in the low single digits. 2-3% per year is a good approximation.
  • Cloud spending is growing at 40% plus per year.
  • What we call The Big Shift is accelerating and is going to have a tremendous impact on the traditional IT industry in the coming years. For every $1.00 increase in public cloud spending, there is a corresponding $3.00-$4.00 decrease in customer-owned IT spend.

There are some other things we know about The Big Shift:

The Big Shift is disrupting old industry paradigms and governance models. We see market evidence of this in traditional IT industry powerhouses like HP and Dell struggling to adapt and reinvent themselves and to maintain relevance and dominance in the new ITaaS era. We even saw perennial powerhouse Cisco lower its 5 year growth forecast during last calendar Q’4 due to the forces at play in the market. In short, the Big Shift is driving disruption throughout the entire IT supply chain. Companies tied to the traditional, customer-owned IT world are finding themselves under financial pressures and are struggling to adapt. Born in the cloud companies like Amazon are seeing tremendous and accelerating growth as the market embraces ITaaS.

In corporate America, the Big Shift is causing inertia as corporate IT leaders and their staffs reassess their IT strategies and strive to determine how best to execute their IT initiatives in the context of the tremendous market change going on around them. We see many clients who understand the need to drive to an ITaaS model and embrace hybrid cloud architectures but do not know how best to attack that challenge and prepare to manage in a hybrid cloud world. This lack of clarity is causing delays in decision making and stalling important IT initiatives.

Let’s discuss cloud for a bit. Cloud computing is a big topic that elicits emotional reactions. Cloud-speak is pervasive in our industry. By this point, the vast majority of your IT partners and vendors are couching their solutions as cloud, or as-a-service, solutions. Some folks in the industry are bold enough to tell you that they have the magic cloud pill that will lead you to ITaaS nirvana. Due to this, many IT professionals that I speak with are sick of talking about cloud and shy away from the topic. My belief is that this avoidance is counterproductive and driven by cloud pervasiveness, lack of precision and clarity when discussing cloud, and the change pressure the cloud revolution is imposing on all professional technologists. The age old mandate to embrace change or die has never been more relevant. Therefore, we feel it is imperative to tackle the cloud discussion head on.

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Let me take a stab at clarifying the cloud discussion. Figure 1 below represents the Big Shift. As noted above, it is undeniable that workloads are shifting from private, customer owned IT architectures, to public, customer rented platforms, i.e. the public cloud. We see three vectors of change in the industry that are defining the cloud revolution.

Cloud Change Vectors

The first vector is the modernization of legacy, customer-owned architectures. The dominant theme here over the past 5-7 years has been the virtualization of the compute layer. The dominant player during this wave of transformation has been VMware. The first wave of virtualization has slowed in the past 4-6 quarters as the compute virtualization market has matured and the vast majority of x86 workloads have been virtualized. There is a new second wave that is just forming and that will be every bit as powerful and important as the first wave. This wave is represented by new, advanced forms of virtualization and the continued abstraction of more complex components of traditional IT infrastructure: networking, storage, and ultimately entire datacenters as we move to a world of software defined datacenter (SDDC) in the coming years.

The second vector of change in the cloud era involves deploying automation, orchestration, and service catalogues to enable private cloud computing environments for internal users and lines of business. Private cloud environments are the industry and corporate IT’s reaction to the public cloud providers’ ability to provide faster, cheaper, better service levels to corporate end users and lines of business. In short, the private cloud change vector is driven by the fact that internal IT now has competition. Their end users and lines of business, development teams in particular, have new service level expectations based on their consumer experiences and their ability to get fast, cheap, commodity compute from the likes of Amazon. To compete, corporate IT staffs must enable self-service functionality for their lines of business and development teams by deploying advanced management tools that provide automation, orchestration, and service catalogue functionality.

The third vector of change in the cloud era involves tying the inevitable blend of private, customer-owned architectures together with the public cloud platforms in use today at most companies. The result is a true hybrid cloud architectural model that can be managed, preserving the still valid command and control mandates of traditional corporate IT,  and balancing those mandates with the end user empowerment and velocity expected in today’s cloud world.

In the context of these three change vectors we see several approaches within our customer base. We see some customers taking a “boil the ocean” approach and striving to rationalize their entire application portfolios to determine best execution venues and define a path to a true hybrid cloud architecture. We see other customers taking a much more cautious approach and leveraging cloud-based point solutions like desktop and disaster recovery as-a-service to solve old business problems in new ways. Both approaches are valid and depend on uses cases, budgets, and philosophical approach (aggressive, leading-edge, versus conservative follow-the-market thinking).

GreenPages business strategy in the context of the ITaaS and cloud revolution is simple. We have built an organization that has the people, process, and technologies to provide expert strategic guidance and proven cloud-era solutions for our clients through a historical inflection point in the way that information technology is delivered to corporate end users and lines of business. Our cloud management as a service offering (CMaaS) provides a technology platform that helps customers integrate the disparate management tools deployed in their environments and federate alerts through an enterprise command center approach that gives a singular view into physical, virtual, and public cloud workloads. CMaaS also provides cloud service brokerage and governance capabilities allowing our customers to view price-performance analytics across private and public cloud environments, design service models and view the related bills of material, and view and consolidate billings across multiple public cloud providers. What are your thoughts on the Big Shift? How is your organization addressing the changes in the IT landscape?