We all know it's a far cry between pretty vendor powerpoints and actually making this stuff work in a live enterprise IT environment.
Fortunately, we are getting much better at bringing our own internal experiences to bear in a way that many people are finding increasingly useful.
And this is shaping up to be pretty cool, indeed ...
Surprise! EMC Is A Big Consumer Of IT
We're an aggressive technology company with ~50K employees scattered around the globe. Our products and services are the direct result of our most precious asset -- our intellectual capital. Our customer-centric focus forces different parts of the organization to work together in formal and informal ways.
And, oh yes, we're a serious player in an industry that's rapidly transforming /consolidating / commoditizing, and we've got some decent competitors in our different segments.
And, just like any other enterprise, we want our IT guys to not only keep the lights on, but give us a differentiated competitive edge across the business.
Sound familiar?
It All Started With The New CIO
Sanjay Mirchandani has been CIO here for several quarters, and things are kicking into high gear now. Sanjay is a business executive who's taken on increasingly important roles in our organization since he's been here. He's now been asked to transform our internal approach to IT.
Need I point out, he is not a career IT organization person.
On the agenda is everything that you'd find in any large organization. Making IT more relevant to the business. Building speed and flexibility on top of efficiency, reliability and security. His punch list looks like many of the others I've seen in my travels.
It's a transformational journey that covers the spectrum, has to be delivered quickly, and can't break the business while it's being done.
For example, a plan to virtualize 100% of EMC's workloads. A complete implementation of virtual desktops. A full private cloud model, including federation of internal and external resources. World-class security and governance that's far better and far less intrusive than anything we could do in the physical world. A variety of consumption models to match EMC's different business needs.
It's heady stuff, indeed.
Where he and EMC have gone the extra mile is investing in resources to tell our story externally: what we're doing, why we're doing it, how we're approaching it, all the decisions we had to make, all the justifications we had to do, all the problems we encounter, and -- hopefully -- all the successes we encounter.
We've set up an external site to blog about the journey. There's some good stuff there today, but more is coming soon.
What people *really* want to see are the justifications and plans we use to make the case. For example, the board-level justification for the virtual desktop project. Or the project plan associated with the virtualize-then-move data center consolidation. Or, perhaps the cloud governance model our team put in place. Or how we're using SaaS, yet still retaining control.
Lots more where that came from. And, as you can easily tell, this stuff isn't being delivered by slick marketing guys like myself. These are real-world IT practitioners that sweat the same details that you do every day.
So, consider this an early invitation from me and EMC to chronicle our progress here.
It should be extremely interesting.
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