Michael Keen

Farewell (for now)

Michael Keen — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:47:00 GMT

This will be my last post. I'm not going to write about strategy or anything else, but more of a way to let you all know that it has been great writing content for Brian and Gabe. Back in May, Brian asked me to take what I was doing on my old blog and start writing for BM.com. I, of course, was stoked be able to share my viewpoints, best practices, etc with his following on the site. I've shared many things in those 7 months, like how to build a solid business case for your projects (which I still need to finish), how to have a conversation with your management about the importance of application delivery, and my input on the "cloud computing" hype.

It has been a great run and I have thanked Brian privately for the opportunity to share my thoughts and such with the rest of the community but I'll thank him here publicly; Thanks Brian for the chance to share my thoughts and experiences with the readers of BM.com.

What am I going to do now? Well my day job keeps me very busy with design reviews, architecture work, some implementation work, etc, I still work to build the Citrix user community here in Iowa and the surrounding states, I have made taking Geek Speak Live out on the road a passion and bringing the great conversations to the hinterlands, I continue to keep the Iowa Citrix Users Group going and planning on doing a lot more with that in 2009, and I continue to speak about business and technology, strategy, etc to local groups. So in addition to my "real job", I'll continue to have a voice in the community. You may even see me pop in here every once in a while if Brian and Gabe want a contribution.

Lastly, but definitely not least, I wanted to thank all of you for giving me a chance to share my voice, thoughts, etc. I'm working on a new gig so keep your eyes and ears open (at least those of you out there that read my stuff).

I wish Brian and Gabe the best in their new jobs at TechTarget and the renewed focus on "hard core" technical content here in BM.com.

Cheers
Michael

Viewpoint on GM and IT

Michael Keen — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:57:00 GMT

We've all been hearing about how the big 3 automakers are coming with "hat in hand" to Washington to get their hands on $25 billion to help them survive. There are many opinions out there about this and I'm not going to share everything I think about this, but I will share my thoughts around innovation as it pertains to GM.

Here is a company that hasn't really been in innovation-mode for over 30+ years from a product perspective, but they are innovative on the IT front. CIO Ralph Szygenda, is a very innovative person and a highly respected IT professional and he is, unfortunately, damned by association. The company continues to lose billions a quarter because of an outdated business model and a lack of cost control. One of the shining jewels within this behemoth in my opinion is Mr Szygenda's innovative ISS organization. I have a few friends still inside this organization and they tell me that GM's Information Systems and Services division does all it can to help the automaker cut costs and improve market responsiveness, but they can only do so much with very little.

I feel for all the ISS folks inside GM and I applaud your efforts to innovate and help the company attempt to turn the corner to profitablity again. Unfortunately, you are damned by association just like your great CIO. I hope that things work out, but more importantly I hope that you all get a whole new management team (while keeping Mr Szygenda) and really be the powerhouse I know that you can be.

I'm not familiar with Ford and Chrsyler, but I can only speculate that they are trying valiantly to do the same as the GM ISS organization. It's just too bad that it will probably come down to these three once great companies will have to go the way of Chapter 11 to get rid of management, those expensive union agreements, outdated business model, and get back to their innovative and visionary selves.

Good luck to all the IT folks inside these companies (Ford, GM, Chrysler). I can't speak for everyone in the IT world, but I can tell you that I am thinking about you all and I wish you all the best no matter what happens.

Good luck

Virtual Desktops and N=1

Michael Keen — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:00:00 GMT

This will probably shock a lot of you, but this will probably be my shortest post ever.

It's been the buzz for quite some time. We spent a great deal of time talking about it at the last BriForum, I hear about it from customers in almost every meeting. What is it? Virtual Destkops. Besides the technical reasoning of where and why it does and does not work, of which I'm pretty confident some of those issues/challenges will be solved sooner rather than later, strategically it's just one way for IT to create value for the business and reduce some costs.

I was meeting with a very large manufacturing client earlier this week and we were talking about the "user experience". I mentioned that there has been a lot of buzz around the "N=1 principle". I got "the look" (you know the one that says, "I have no idea what you are talking about"). I politely explained that this is where companies move away from just products and services and more to the individual "customer" experience. So, from an IT perspective, where the business is our customer, in order to create this value for the business doesn't it make sense to use virtual desktops as a way to focus on the individual user and their computing experience?

Citrix and VMware have talked about this user "personalization" for awhile now. Dan Feller did a great post over on the Citrix blogs on XenDesktop Design Concepts here and here. These two posts line out what to keep in mind when doing virtual desktops and delivering the OS and the apps to those virtual machines. So does it make strategic and, of course, economic sense to create a new IT service around virtual desktops? That's a big question. IT Portfolio Management is something that needs to be looked at, but I think this is a way for the folks buried deep inside the IT organization to put your heads together and innovate.

What are your thoughts?

Geek Speak Road Trip #2 Registration Info

Michael Keen — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:20:00 GMT

hey all, well now that we have a few things solidified (nothing like cutting it short on time huh?), I wanted to share with you all here in the Midwest the registration link for the event. I hope that if you are around you will plan to make it to the live event. I am also working with James Rabey at Citrix to tie into the virtual event on that same day, so hopefully you can catch all the fun and excitement here in Des Moines. I'll have the virtual information very very soon, so hold tight for that and also check out the Citrix blogs as well for more info.

We have Rick Dehlinger, Doug Brown, I'm working on Rich Crusco and Gus Pinto, so it's going to be an awesome event.

If you can make it please register, we'd love to have you!!!

http://www.alliancetechnologies.net/news/geek-speak-event-dec08.php

See you there in person or virtually!

Enterprise Architecture: another component to an agile and flexible enterprise

Michael Keen — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:52:00 GMT

In the last post I spoke about the importance of IT governance. Although IT governance is critical to the success of having a flexible and agile enterprise, having an overarching enterprise architecture to show how all the components of the enterprise are related and to guide the decisions that affect IT is just as important.

Now I'm sure that most of you out there have an enterprise architecture in place, but for those of you who don't, I'll give you my two cents. The essence of an enterprise architecture is that it lays out how information and IT enable the realization of the enterprise strategy, and it provides a framework for supporting and automating business processes using IT capabilities. Together with the IT strategic planning process, an enterprise architecture helps align IT initiatives more effectively with your strategic business imperatives. It identifies both the current state of the enterprise and the future desired state, and it enables business and IT managers, including the governance team, to see how the enterprise can transform itself in stages from the current state to the envisioned future state.

I've seen some clients approach enterprise architecture as something that is done and 'set and forget'..big mistake. An enterprise architecture is not simply a static document. It is a dynamic, disciplined, ongoing process. It's central focus is on evolving the key operational processes of the enterprise (the enterprise business architecture) and the information systems that support them (the enterprise IT architecture).

By describing the essential, overall design of these architectures as a holistic "system of systems" and by providing the context, guidance, and discipline for the development of the more detailed, system- and service-specific architectures, an enterprise architecture provides a way to translate between business needs and IT capabilities. It shows how the business needs are to be met by the enterprise's information systems and the information services they provide, thereby creating a bridge that ensures alignment of business and IT.

Taking a holistic architectural view of the enterprise helps strike an effective balance across all business and IT imperatives, with a particular emphasis on agility. It helps planners see how the enterprise currently works, and how it could and should work in the future.

The strategy provides the overall direction (vision, goals/objectives, and measures) for the enterprise and the IT capability, while the architecture describes the operational and information systems as they are, and as they should be to realize the strategy.
The IT investment planning aspect of strategic planning (often referred to as project portfolio management) uses the architecture to identify initiatives with high strategic value and acceptable risk and adds them to a committed plan of record.
Your program management office then drives execution of the initiatives in the plan of record, with reviews against the architecture at appropriate points in the initiatives’ lifecycles.

As long as I can remember, enterprise architecture has long been promoted as a key tool in bridging the gap between business and IT. But even within the last few years, the practice of enterprise architecture had failed to deliver on a lot of the hype, causing many to lose interest. Several factors have combined to once again bring enterprise architecture to the forefront again:

The discipline of enterprise architecture has matured, learning from past mistakes of over-reaching, not paying enough attention to benefits vs. costs, and focusing too much on IT considerations.
The costs to operate and maintain information systems have continued to grow, providing a large payback for architecture-led efforts to rationalize processes and consolidate systems.
Architecture methods and tools have advanced significantly, including improvements in modeling of business strategies, processes, and metrics, and relating them to IT capabilities.
Many partial models and other architectural elements are widely available, greatly lowering costs and significantly improving the ability to provide automated, flexible, real-time linkages between enterprises.

So to wrap up this up, when properly envisioned and implemented, an enterprise architecture is a fundamental tool that anticipates future needs and enables you to implement change rapidly in response to changing business priorities. It enables your IT organization to respond rapidly to changes in business strategy, processes, and environment. It enables your business units to realize their critical business goals and strategies by providing a framework that supports all the processes, information, and IT systems that those goals and strategies require.

In the culture of innovation, leadership is key

Michael Keen — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:00:00 GMT

I've often blogged about innovation here as it related to using the technology we work in to innovate. Now I want to take a different tack and look at the culture of innovation in a broad scope and share some of my thoughts and experiences.

In all of the reading I've done and my work inside some of the biggest companies in the world, I've learned a lot on the subject of making innovation work and the one thing that it comes down to is the culture and leadership of the company. Culture has many components, but I think one of the most important is the leadership of the company. Your CEO has significant impact on the innovation culture that grows (or doesn't grow) in your company. The CEO of your company is the key role player in making innovation part of the company culture. Just talking about it and putting the strategy and systems in place is not nearly enough which I see a lot of C-level executives doing. One of the best books I've read around the culture of innovation is The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley. Tom and his brother David Kelley run IDEO, one of the leading industrial design firms in the world. This company is the apitomy of innovative culture right up there with the folks at Apple. David Kelly did an interview back in 2003 with the Harvard Business Review where he said, "some companies seem more comfortable going through the methodological motions than making the cultural commitments that ongoing innovation demands." CEOs have to work on and in the innovation culture.

It's always very interesting to look around companies and see what kind of innovative culture they have. Some of the companies that I've been to have had the technology folks in charge of innovation, but the business folks managing the process. This is the stage-gate process. They I've seen where the business side is in charge of the innovation and they invite IT to the table with the goal of achieving this sense of collaboration. Here is where the leadership of the CEO has to be intimately involved. For innovation to work both functions have to be managed together. One great example that I can think of is Steve Jobs. Here is a guy that is clearly the innovation leader in his company and he pushes very hard to make sure that business and technology have effective collaboration.

I can tell you that an innovative culture has to be both conservative and risk-taker at the same time. The conservative side makes sure that all employees are keenly aware of the importance of the resources that they are entrusted with. That means that every investment and expense has to be looked at from an ROI perspective. I can tell you from experience that a culture of unquestioned spending, where there is little regard for the value of the resources will lead to disaster and a company that fails at innovation.

The timing of this post and an article at CIO.com is very serendipitous. Today Diann Daniel posted a story on Microsoft's Culture of Innovation: An Interview with CIO Tony Scott This is a great read on how Mr Scott manages innovation. They too have to balance to two factors of control and trust (or as this story puts it "freedom and control"). Control has to make informed decisions around resource allocation, strategy development, and performance evaluation. The trust/freedom part usually happens outside the view of C-level executives and I can see that Mr Scott can manage this innovation well enough to not kill off ideas. Take a quick read.

So what is the innovation culture like at your company? Do you work in an environment where innovation (of any kind) is encouraged? Do you feel that there is no innovative collaboration between business and IT?

Let me know your thoughts.

IT Governance; the foundation for an agile and flexible enterprise

Michael Keen — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:08:00 GMT

I did a post week or so ago on Simplification, Standardization, and Integration and the Citrix Delivery Center. Now I want to lay the foundation for how those design principles are put to work. The foundation for any agile and flexible enterprise is IT governance. So what is "governance"? it is about establishing a framework to ensure that all decisions are made by the right person or persons, to put it simply. Now most of you reading this have an IT governance framework in place at your companies, so you can either read on to see what I have to say about its importance or you can stop and I'll continue on for those out there that don't have one or are looking at putting this framework in place.

In today's world, IT governance has considerable momentum, but there are varying ideas about just what IT governance is. I see IT governance as a formal process of defining the strategy of the IT organization within the context of an overarching business strategy and overseeing its execution to achieve the goals of the enterprise. So let's take a closer look at my definition. As a formal process, IT governance involves the creation of a decision rights framework and the mechanisms for enabling those decisions and managing those rights like

who is authorized to make which decisions
what processes, involving which parties, will be used to make those decisions
how the decisions will be enforced

With me so far? Ok, so when defining the IT strategy, governance should also define the IT mission, vision, goals and priorities, and key performance metrics - by which IT will be measured. It should also define the business value drivers for IT services and initiatives. Governance should also articulate ITs commitments to the business units. But I think most important of all is that it commits resources to the IT organization so that IT can deliver on its mission. As it relates to the execution of the IT strategy, governance allows the necessary alignment and synchronization of the IT organization's tactical and operational plans. Governance will also provide the critical project portfolio management and monitoring of plan execution and ensures accountability.

The one word in this last paragraph that I think is important is: synchronization. In today's world of constant change, IT governance is dynamic. So not only does it operationalize IT strategy so that everyone is aligned with the enterprise strategy, but through ongoing synchronization it also enables IT to stay aligned in the face of this change. Synchronization is a closed-loop process, at least how I've have done it in the past. There are four main stages to this process:

Planning: the IT strategy formulation stage
Driving: the stage where the strategy is driven into the IT organization and infrastructure
Validating: the stage where execution performance is evaluated against the plan
Correcting: the stage where the execution is tuned to improve performance against the plan

So as the business priorities and strategies change, governance drives those changes into the IT organization, stimulating the creation of new strategic IT plans and priorities and refining the priorities of existing plans and projects. Through this closed-loop process of assessment and synchronization the enterprise keeps IT aligned with business priorities.

So once you have business and IT aligned, keeping them that way is a very complex job. It helps to have a simple framework to highlight some of the key responsibilities and relationships. I've used this tool below for many years now for bridging the business-IT and governance-operations dimensions.

Now across these boundaries there is a need for both alignment (of strategies, operational plans, and execution) and visibility (of value and performance). When visibility crosses boundaries this is called "transparency". One thing about this little matrix is that is also provides some context for understanding some of the many possible scenarios of where change events arise and how they flow across these quadrants.

How well is your company setup for adapting to change? How closely is the business and IT aligned? Are they moving towards convergence?

With the new controls that IT governance demands - CIOs must look at running IT like a service delivery business. This isn't really a question how IT charges for its time and services or turning IT into a profit center (although this could be considered I guess). Instead, it's about running IT as that service delivery business and operating efficiently, delivering professional service, acting with the business interests at the top of your mind. It's all about responding to business needs, innovating to provide a best-on-class service, and knowing how best to provide the business units with the services they need.

There is a lot more to IT governance and one of the best resources that I have and one that I would highly recommend is IT Governance by Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross.

Cheers

Geek Speak Road Trip #2 coming to Des Moines

Michael Keen — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 11:48:00 GMT

Yes, it's true. The hit event of last year's Synergy and the latest Partner Summit conference is coming back to Des Moines on December 4th, 2008. Last June we (Citrix and Alliance Technologies) brought Geek Speak out on the road for the first time and had a great turnout. We had Jason Conger, Barry Flanagan, Doug Brown, and me. I'm still working on this event's speakers, but suffice it to say, they will be just as awesome as the last event.

This year we are adding a very interesting twist. My colleague at Citrix, James Rabey, is planning on holding a virtual Geek Speak event on that same day, so if you can't join us in wonderful Des Moines (I know you are all wishing you could be in Iowa in the winter right?), you can join in on some of the conversations and participate via the web at the live event. James and I are still working out the details on this, so stay tuned.

So here are the details as I have them right now:

December 4, 2008 at the Des Moines Golf & Country Club from 1:00pm - 4:00-pm. After the sessions, we will be getting together for food and drinks in the Ballroom from 4:00pm - 5:00pm. I hope everyone that is in the area can make it and those of you who aren't join us over the web for the virtual event.

I'm very excited to be doing this again with my friends at Citrix. It's going to be another great event and the conversations are going to be just as exciting and engaging.

Stay tuned folks.

Change = Opportunity for Innovation in IT

Michael Keen — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:53:00 GMT

If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times, change presents opportunities. The ability to adapt to change is a key advantage in business. To survive, compete, and win, enterprises must adapt. However, because change is often disruptive and expensive, few organizations are prepared to take advantage consistently of the opportunities that change presents.

The IT organization, in particular, is sometimes often seen as a roadblock to business agility. This is somewhat ironic because new information technology should be a key part of the solution. But IT innovation causes so much change, that it is difficult to reap the benefits of this innovation. Accordingly, CIOs have often paid close attention to cost, quality, and risk management concerns. Because of the complexity of the business environment and underlying technologies, the desired end state was typically stability of operations, with changes managed as initiatives delivering new functionality while ensuring ongoing stability and controlling costs.

The situation we find ourselves in today is that IT is still sometimes an inhibitor of the business (in some respects) and we need to get the business and IT organizations to not merely align their efforts but to converge and synchronize them to reap the rewards of being flexible, responsive, and proactive.

One of the key challenges I see, and I'm sure the rest of you see, is that there are these silos of applications and information. For instance, a customer of mine wanted to roll out a new app. It needed to go through five different "silos" to get to the end users. I was in the meeting with them along with the server team, the network team, the security team, the systems mgmt team, and finally the desktop team. All of these "silos" had concerns:

the server team was worried about power and datacenter space
the network team was worried about bandwidth and trafffic
the security team was worried about all the risks and vulnerabilities
the systems mgmt team was worried about trying to make it all fit together
finally, the desktop team who has to support all the end users

These guys were lucky to get any application project out in less than nine months. One of the risks with these silos was that the business requirements changed three times by the time they could get it rolled out. By building an infrastructure that is flexible, responsive, and proactive, with Citrix (they weren't a Citrix customer yet) they were able to satisfy the teams and give the business units what they needed to be more productive.

Another dilemma here is what C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan referred to their book, The New Age of Innovation, as the "line of business and CIO disconnect", because it involves a chasm between what the line of business managers want to accomplish and what CIOs perceive their jobs to be - and how they are perceived. Most CIOs that I have spoken to are still thought of as operating in a technology silo concerned primarily with "internal efficiency" and this is a seriously limiting factor. "It's not surprising that the CIO focus is on maintenance of existing systems and not business innovation."

So why aren't CIOs devoting the required time and effort to innovation in IT? The truth is that most do, and in other cases it's something that isn't really generally expected of them. Overall, CIOs have a very difficult balancing act as seen by this graphic:

Over the years I've talked with numerous CEOs and CIOs and they pretty much tell me the same things. They want to:

    * maximize the return on their investments
    * manage and mitigate risk
    * need improve their IT performance
    * and finally they want more agility

Basically the net here is they want to be able to handle and take advantage of change today to improve their competitiveness, lower costs, and serve their customers better — and build an IT environment and business processes that can easily accommodate tomorrow’s changes. How? In today's perilous economic times IT budgets are being slashed. CIOs are having a tough time with changes happening continuously, more of the shrinking budget is going to maintenance and integration tasks, with little left over for innovation; but it's not time to retrench. I stated in one of my last posts, that retrenchment will surely buy you time, but it will not buy you opportunity, growth or a future.

I'm going to be speaking to a group of IT executives in two weeks and I will be telling them this same thing about retrenchment. My three pillars of the argument are: Flexibility, Responsiveness, and Proactive. How do we take what they currently have and then rearchitect it to give them an infrastructure that will allow IT to innovate for the business? Simplification, Standardization, Integration, and Modularity = Citrix Delivery Center

Now is the time for CIOs to take a long hard look at what Citrix brings to the table. I can pretty much guess that within the 200,000 customers out there, they aren't using it the way that they could to help innovate and be an even bigger "enabler" of the business.

Citrix Delivery Center: Simplification, Standardization, and Integration

Michael Keen — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:47:00 GMT

I have always followed some guiding principles when engaged in designing or reviewing customer environments. I've highlighted these before in past posts, but with last week's Citrix Summit, Mark T mentioned some of these guiding principles in his keynote and I wanted to share how they apply to the Citrix Delivery Center.

Mark's keynote highlighted the some of the issues and challenges that customers have today. For instance, today's environments are still, for the most part, in a distributed computing model. This approach makes it easy to organize people around technical disciplines, but it makes things very hard to get done in today's rapid-fire rate of change in business. I'm sure that each group is very good at what they do, but at today's rate of change it's just too difficult to keep pace with this computing model. Your agility decreases and your costs per user increases. Unfortunately, the conventional approaches most of us have used in IT in the past make it almost impossible to keep pace with the rate of change. The complexity of the modern enterprise - its business and IT components, and its linkages with other enterprises - increases the difficulty of implementing changes. Different elements change at different rates, but the pressure to change is always there. In this environment, how can we make our businesses more agile and capitalize on change?

I've always approached "change" as the fundamental architectural problem in today's environments. In discussions with clients, we recognize that to be agile we need to balance three other key dimensions: financial returns, performance, and risk management.

These high-level guiding principles promote agility and are applied across people, processes and technology throughout the extended enterprise:

Simplification
Standardization
Integration

Let's touch on the the first principle: Simplification. Mark had a great quote in his keynote last week from Albert Einstein; "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler." Very well stated Mr Einstein. Simplification is where we strive to "simplify" complex IT environments through the consolidation of applications and infrastructures, the automation and orchestration of processes, and the virtualization of resources. These tasks are at the core strategy of why you implement the Citrix Delivery Center to drive efficiencies in your enterprise.

Let's look at the tasks one-by-one:

Consolidation of applications and infrastructure. Here is where we get away from the "deployment" scenario and get more to the "delivery" mechanism. We will centralize applications in the data center where we can more easily manage and support and control and secure applications. Mark T made the statement during his keynote, that "here is the head-end infrastructure that allows you to centralize the complexity and leave behind this very simple component where you can deliver applications". From the infrastructure perspective, I've been focusing a lot recently as this being the "virtual desktop". By centralizing the desktop experience in the datacenter we get the same benefits of manageability and support, and control and security. It also introduces other challenges as well. But in order to gain more simplicity from the infrastructure perspective this is a viable option. We can get this accomplished very well with XenDesktop. I'm in love with this product, but I want to make it perfectly clear that it is not a panacea for desktop delivery. Desktop Virtualization works best as part of a comprehensive Desktop Delivery approach which focuses on the most efficient way to get applications to the end user and meet business and IT needs, not just a PC equivalent.

Automation and orchestration of processes. When it comes to automation and orchestration, Citrix has a good one on it's hands if it could ever get it out the door: Citrix Workflow Studio. Workflow Studio is a platform that enables simple, yet enterprise-scale, data center and business process automation through the use of Windows PowerShell. Through it's graphical workflow GUI, you can build full automation of your business and/or IT processes including user account management, server and application provisioning, security enforcement and automation, disaster recovery automation, and routine and emergency maintenance on data center resources. I've tested this product in the lab and I love it's tight integration and support for automating and provisioning applications and systems with XenServer, Provisioning Server, and EdgeSight. Now how cool would it be if visionapp vADM integrated with Citrix Workflow Studio? I spoke with Rick Dehlinger over at visionapp, since visionapp is my best practice toolset, and he tells me that depending on how Citrix finalizes the productization of Workflow Studio, visionapp plans to use it extensively. According to Rick, they will likely use it on a number of different fronts, including cross product/platform (think user/machine/workload provisioning) and user self-service/reporting. Put me on the list to help test that out Rick. I'm hopeful that Citrix has this ready for prime-time in Q4 possibly.

Virtualization of resources. This is what everyone is talking about today: Virtualization. It's at the top of every CIOs list of priorities for 2009 and the one technology that is still seeing budget dollars being allocated to it in these tough economic times. Why virtualize your resources? According to IDC, 41 million servers will be deployed in 2010, that's a 700% increase over a 15 year timespan. The average server utilization rate still remains at 10-15%, which if you do the math, equates to about $100 -140 billion in unused capacity. Physical servers are costly to maintain. These costs encompass provisioning, housing, power, cooling, management, etc. Physical servers are static. The one workload to one server is killing companies. Believe it or not, I'm still hearing clients and potential clients saying that they are concerned with performance, complexity, the platforms supported, and (I love this one), mission critical readiness. Although virtualization's rise has been meteoric, the adoption rate is still low. We are all aware of the players here, so I'm not going to bore you with a competitive comparison. Suffice it to say, I think XenServer 5.0 has come a long way from the days of XenSource. I'll leave this up to you to decide, but everyone should be virtualizing if you aren't already.

The second principle: Standardization. In the terms of this post, I'll focus on the standardization of the Desktop and Server Operating System builds. First, let me give you a business case. I recently walked into an environment with thirty XenApp servers and every one of them was configured differently. They had a manual process for building every single server and desktop environment along with getting the right app workload on it. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that this introduces more complexity and confusion into environments. After doing an holistic assessment of their enterprise, I recommended using Citrix Provisioning Server. My roadmap for this client was to get them to a "dynamic data center". To understand Provisioning Server’s value in the datacenter, we walked through a high-level look at its key functionality – server-workload streaming. Through server-workload streaming, Provisioning Server enables that dynamic datacenter I was going for. This customer would be able to centrally manage server workloads and also deliver those workloads, on-demand. By streaming workloads on-demand rather than physically installing the workload on each individual server, their datacenters became dynamic rather than static. By doing this they accomplished the goal of "server-build consistency", which was one of their KPI's for the project. I do have one hang up here and that is the management of the standard images is not what it could be. I use my best practice tool here as well, visionapp. Their value here is they extend those built-in management capabilities.

The third principle: Integration. I actually have two definitions for this word. First, it's having an infrastructure where are the different moving pieces work seamlessly together, ie. the Citrix Delivery Center (NetScaler, WANScaler, XenApp, Provisioning Server, XenServer, etc). My second definition is to use integration to improve agility and reduce costs by dynamically linking business processes and heterogeneous, reusable IT resources both within and beyond the enterprise. Now the big important point here is the ease of configuring component services to meet new needs. For this post I'll stick with the first definition. I see the entire Citrix Delivery Center as a huge puzzle. Each and every piece fits together, where on the other hand some customers will piecemeal a solution together and introduce more complexity into their environment. By having an infrastructure that you can "modularize" only adds to the scalability and functionality that you can get out of Citrix.

These design principles (I actually left one out, but folded it into Integration, called Modularity) have established the fundamental guidelines that have shaped my customer engagements. You too can take these guidelines and use them to transform your enterprise. Having an infrastructure that is agile and flexible is built, not bought. It's a transformational process. Every enterprise arrives at the task of transforming itself with a different history, differing goals and priorities, and different transformational needs. Accordingly, for every enterprise there lies a unique path with a unique set of steps.

We live and work in a world of accelerating change. To thrive in that world we must be able to embrace change quickly, thoroughly, and efficiently. Traditional enterprise models have always emphasized just the opposite view: that change is not the norm but the exception. The reality here folks is that ever more rapid change is the norm and we must evolve our enterprise models, people, process, and technology to acknowledge the truth. In my opinion, Citrix Delivery Center can help you do this.

Cheers

Today's economic turmoil, IT and being a revolutionary.

Michael Keen — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:32:00 GMT

I have just returned from a well needed mental break. I spent some time back "home" in California. It gave me a chance to recharge my batteries, to see old friends and colleagues, but it also gave me a chance to think about a post that I did back in July. It seems fitting that I come back to it given the current state of things in the economy and business in general.

I was having dinner the other night with some old colleagues and we were talking about politics, business, etc and one of the topics was innovation in IT. This got me to thinking about that old post I did back in July. The previous post, "A dinner conversation" was where I was having dinner with some local executives and we were talking about being "revolutionary" and someone had stated that making bold moves in today's business climate was not the thing to be doing right now.

I disagree. Sure, we have to be smart and weigh the risk, but just standing idly by is not the thing to be doing either. Retrenchment will surely buy you time, but it will not buy you opportunity, growth or a future. Abbie Lundberg, Editor-in-Chief, over at CIO.com had a great "From the Editor" piece this month. She mentioned that Forrester founder and CEO, George Colony had interviewed Mark Hurd and Steve Ballmer. I was very impressed to see that Mark Hurd and Steve Ballmer pushing their companies to "embrace risk". Mr Colony's advice to CIOs: "manage IT like an iceberg, with heavy standardization, reliability and lower costs beneath the waterline, but above the waterline, let it snow." Perfectly stated Mr Colony, and I'll add this; be revolutionary.

I need to repeat this part from my last post because I think it really drives home my point:

"the first step in being a revolutionary for technology is to develop a “point of view”. A well thought out and articulated point of view is the sword that will carry you into battle against the “dragons of precedent”. It becomes the rudder that lets you steer a course in a world of people being tossed about by fad and whim. And it will be your ‘true North’ that will guide you through times of tribulation and challenge. To use this sailing metaphor, ‘true North’ is the actual point around which the earth spins, whereas “magnetic North” is where the compass needle points. True North never varies, while magnetic north moves over time and shifts positions. What I’m getting at is if you maintain your Point of View and don’t bend to every whim and fad you will guide your organization and company to great success."

We all have a point of view of the technologies we work in. You can take those points of view and be that revolutionary in your company. You can help drive change. We can take Citrix technologies and other technologies and make great things happen for the business and drive that convergence of IT and business. I'll state again like I stated to my colleagues last week, revolutionaries are great for creating movements, but they don’t create mandates. You need the right person(s) in the executive suites. You need to help them see what you see, to learn what you have learned and to feel that same sense of urgency and inevitability that you feel. Talk about the ways that you can use the technologies that you have. Talk about workload mobility, how to drive simplification in your environment by automating the management of the infrastructure, talk about the energy and space efficiencies and how they play into to helping the company meet cost savings goals. Use the four guiding principles of design that I have followed for the past five years: Simplification, Standardization, Integration, and Modularity.

Don't let the difficult times we live in keep you from using the technologies like Citrix, VMWare, and other to innovate and create value.

How to get your IT project funded: Build a Solid Business Case: Step 4, Calculate Part 1

Michael Keen — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:48:27 GMT

My mentor at HP had the perfect saying; "when it's about money, get it right". That is so true when it comes to developing and building a business case. ...(read more)

How to get your IT project funded: Build a Solid Business Case: Step 3, Align

Michael Keen — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 16:27:06 GMT

So in the previous two steps I have outlined how to get the Scope and boundaries nailed down and how to gather the criteria, apply it to the value matrix, and then filter to the top 6 to 12 most important criteria to the decision makers. In this next step, Align, we will connect the dots, and more specifically make sure that the decision criteria we gathered links to key business goals....(read more)

IT and Business Convergence

Michael Keen — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:45:43 GMT

We all read the headlines, we hear about collapse this, bailout that, cows sleeping with chickens, a general sense of anarchy right?. One thing that crazy times like this get me to thinking about, besides how cheap stocks are right now, is the relationship between the business and IT. It's still a relationship, for the most part, that is not where it should be....(read more)

A new strategy from Citrix and VMware: Will this change the industry and the competitive landscape?

Michael Keen — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:20:11 GMT

I've been thinking recently of the latest offerings out of Citrix and VMware, along with the statements made at VMWorld a few weeks ago around the VDC-OS and the Citrix announcement of C3. What does this mean for the industry and what is this going to do to the competitive landscape of our industry?...(read more)