The majority of IT leaders will at some point find themselves in the midst of a conflict between the needs of their business partners and development teams, and the real-world requirements of managing a large systems infrastructure. The conflicting goals of these groups may have caused simmering frustration just below the surface for some time, then bubbling up with new pressures on software development timelines (go faster!), budget pressures or even the recognition that there is now real competition for internal enterprise infrastructure in cloud computing vendors.
For presentation sake I am combining the Development and Business views, which may include the following:
Infrastructure View:
- Standardization lowers organizational costs.
- Control of infrastructure offerings enables a reduction in differentiation, and will increase availability.
- Infrastructure managers are graded/incentivized in large part on availability and managing costs, rather than on speed-to-market.
- When developers are allowed to dictate environmental specs, organizational resources may be wasted.
- There is theoretical potential for cost savings in the management of a large-scale environment serving many internal customers.
- It is inherently difficult to itemize cost structures for a specific dev/prod environment within a large, distributed enterprise.