{"id":17,"date":"2005-04-24T09:37:20","date_gmt":"2005-04-24T15:37:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=17"},"modified":"2005-04-24T09:37:20","modified_gmt":"2005-04-24T15:37:20","slug":"an_industrial_r","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=17","title":{"rendered":"IT’s industrial revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to a reference<\/a> in Chris Koch’s IT strategy blog, I just read a long, boring but important article on business computing in the McKinsey Quarterly. Titled Managing Next-Generation IT Infrastructure<\/a>, the piece argues that we’re now ready for an “industrial revolution” in the way big companies assemble their IT infrastructures – all the servers, storage devices, operating systems and other basic hardware and software components used to run their business applications. Rather than custom-build new chunks of infrastructure to fit new applications – the traditional practice that has created such complexity and inefficiency in business computing – companies can build a single standardized set of computing modules, or, as the authors poetically put it, “productized, reusable services,” that can be allocated to new applications as needed. You manage your infrastructure like a modern factory, in other words, rather than an ancient craft guild.<\/p>\n

Such a model requires much greater centralized control over a business’s entire infrastructure – to put it in my own terms, it requires the creation of an internal IT utility – but it brings much higher levels of capacity utilization, reduces the headaches associated with integrating dozens of custom-built systems and provides a much clearer view of where an organization’s IT spending really goes. The most valuable part of the article is a sidebar<\/a> describing Deutsche Telekom’s experience in moving to this new model of infrastructure management.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Business IT should be managed like a factory not a craft guild<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}