Dear IT: Forget the technology

Upfront input

Things can get pretty hairy in the absence of such alignment. Morris cites a case of SAP application performance gone bad at his company. "The apps guys tested it on the LAN, and it was fantastic. Little did they know that each session was chewing up about 400Kbps of bandwidth. On a LAN, that's nothing, but over a WAN, you can only put about four or five of those in before the circuit fills up," he says. "That's the kind of stuff that needs to be seen by us more at the beginning. And we're starting to evolve that way."

Hinkle agrees, although he's not too sure how fast that evolution will be. At the AHA, business users buy the bulk of applications. If they suit the needs of the business, they get deployed, no matter what, he says. "If I were brought in during the evaluation phase, I'd leave the meeting and go buy a lottery ticket!" he says. "I don't foresee that happening in the near future."

Until it does, acceleration and the like help mitigate problems, Hinkle says: "If we optimize and accelerate traffic, then it might run like it's on a slow LAN rather than a slow WAN."

Ideally, IT departments wouldn't have to consider the quick technology fix. Instead, they'd reorganize around service delivery.

"If you spend $500,000 on WAN acceleration and make the application respond five seconds faster, what's the business benefit of that?" Morris asks. "You might get some benefit out of it because it's good technology, but it's not going to be a business-changer unless you truly align with the business and understand the goals and objectives. There are a lot of organizational, communications and relationship issues you need to build before you can really exploit the technology."

Getting the IT department to the point where it can deliver optimized applications end to end is an evolutionary, iterative process that top IT executives need to drive. "You need to publish the mantra 'We're delivering services, and we're all a part of this value chain,'" Adaptivity's Bishop says. "And you have to educate and re-educate, measure and re-measure. It's like a broken record."

In the end, Bishop envisions IT departments organized like a utility, in which there are generalists in charge of monitoring and management of services, specialists aligned to services for development, and SWAT teams to address problems as they arise. "The way [the IT group] participates in the service delivery, and how everything is monitored and managed, cuts across everything," Bishop says. "There is just one monitoring and management group everyone answers to."

The payoff will become obvious, experts say. As staff becomes more fully involved in application development, delivery and support, optimization just naturally falls out.

"Management may look at this and say it's too costly and it takes too long to deliver the application, but you need to look at the long-term benefits," Morris says. "If you're talking about applications that run your business, you don't want people working in silos. You want people understanding and involved in the application and taking ownership."

Cummings is a freelance writer in the US. She can be reached at jocummings@comcast.net.