Thoughts on Gartner’s Data Center Conference

Gartner’s Annual Data Center conference is always an interesting event – the glitter of Las Vegas notwithstanding. This conference provides a full slate of in-depth and interesting sessions, up close and personal access to Gartner’s most senior analysts, and keynotes from interesting and entertaining folks, such as Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon. I don’t know about you, but I listen a little closer to presentations when I know that the speaker not only lives and breathes the subject matter, but surrounds their message with research data collected from us – the industry vendor and user community that is also living and breathing this stuff.

As you might expect, the conference touched on dominant data center strategies such as consolidation, virtualization, business continuity management, and disaster recovery. The show also had an appropriate strategic focus on servers, operating systems, storage, CMDBs, and other software infrastructure technologies that make life in the data center so much fun. There have already been some good blog posts and articles about the conference like this and this and this.

Just as important, although perhaps not as prominently presented, is a message of maturity – specifically IT Operations and Infrastructure maturity. This is best exemplified by a presentation given early in the week by Donna Scott and Jay Pultz, Gartner Vice Presidents, distinguished analysts, entitled “IT Leaders: Enhance Your Business Value with the Gartner Maturity Model”. Jay posted a blog summary about the model earlier this week.

Despite the ongoing pressure and prioritization to restructure IT I/O (infrastructure and operations) as a provider of business value, this is not something that occurs overnight, and you cannot limit your efforts to deliver business value to just mindset or technology or approach. This is an evolution of all aspects of your data center. It is complex, it will take time, and it will require patience. It will also require that you continually measure your level of maturity as a value provider. Gartner’s maturity model can help you achieve this goal.

In their presentation, Donna and Jay first described the people, process, and technology dimensions that provide business value in a successful I&O Maturity Model (IOMM). They talked about where to focus efforts and how to use the IOMM. For example: IT leaders need to focus on process standards, metrics, and levels of process integration with organizational practices; the importance of establishing and nurturing a culture of IT business value among the people in the organization; and the right technology and best practices to facilitate business value.

Most importantly, this presentation provided a detailed self-assessment to the attendees to evaluate their level of maturity in enhancing and demonstrating business value to their customers. This is something that IT organizations need help accomplishing – how to effectively assess and measure progress toward delivering business value to the organization. Not surprisingly, many of the attendees demonstrated high interest and willingness to be viewed as a dynamic business partner to their organization and customers, but few had demonstrated real success.

The bottom line - if your management, your customers, your organization, and you as a member of the IT community are striving to become a mature proactive business partner that can clearly demonstrate the business value of IT, it is worth your time to investigate Gartner’s IOMM.

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Filed Under: Business Continuity, IT Operations, Virtualization