Why rapid tech change demands better internal consensus-building | #HPDiscover
When an enterprise sets out to streamline operations or pursue new business opportunities, technology considerations often jump to the top of the agenda, edging out the important organizational challenges that need to be addressed, said Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Chris Coggrave in a recent appearance on theCUBE.
As the chief technologist for the data center giant’s $4.8 billion professional services business, Coggrave is well familiar with the bureaucratic and political barriers to change that exist in most large companies. The proliferation of cloud services has actually raised the stakes for IT, he said. Users now expect to provision internal IT resources as easily as they set up a Salesforce.com account. But few enterprise IT organizations are equipped to respond so fluidly.
HP runs workshops that bring together decision-makers from different parts of the organization to hammer out consensus. That’s essential to have in place before tackling the notoriously difficult challenges of planning and implementing new technology at enterprise scale.
“We talk a lot about technology, but the people and the process are becoming more and more important,” he told theCUBE host Dave Vellante.
Organizations need to address the legacy IT infrastructure, which in many cases has left thousands of applications scattered across silos. It will take years to overhaul the portfolio, so in the meantime managers on the business and IT side need to negotiate realistic expectations. “When the business says ‘we need something now,’ it’s a case of going away, working it out and figuring out what it’s going to take and how long instead of saying ‘how high do you want us to jump?'” Coggrave said.
The journey to services and software-defined infrastructure will take years for most IT organizations, but the “here and now” mentality that line-of-business departments are adopting won’t go away. IT organizations need to streamline processes as much as possible, working with a base of support from visionary and patient executives.
“It’s about having the right people involved, building consensus an then taking the project forward, not as a big bang but as an incremental approach where you’re looking at quick wins and building on those,” he said.
Watch the full interview (25:44)
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