CIOs are an optimistic lot these days. According to recent survey data from InformationWeek, 61 percent of those IT executives surveyed indicate that their IT budgets will remain the same or shrink. Yet the vast majority claim that important new projects for cloud, Big Data, security, and more will come from “new money” rather than “savings.”
How does that math work?
It’s not as if the proposed projects are useful. As shown below, CIO’s seem to have a good handle on where money should be spent:
What they lack, of course, is a grasp on reality in terms of funding all these projects, as shown here:
And while we at Nodeable don’t have the be-all, end-all answer for how to fund these projects, we can suggest one: optimize efficiency of existing resources. This actually fits IT priorities, generally. After all, four of the top-five projects identified are “block-and-tackle” projects that improve existing systems rather than introducing a gee-whiz new line of business system.
The difference, of course, is that one can introduce a system like Nodeable and not only bring down costs (by tuning cloud systems based on our trending data, anomalies we flag in how resources are being used, etc.), but also drive one’s business by analyzing how resources are being used at a macro level.
I can see, for example, who is most active in handling JIRA tickets. I can see which of my developers show up most often in the GitHub activity stream. And while I can of course track waste in my use of AWS, I can also benchmark how my company manages its storage and compute resources against how others do.
Ultimately, what needs to be done is bring IT in better alignment with business goals. The DevOps trend does this by reducing bureaucracy, allowing developers to get work done with a minimum of overhead. This is the crowd Nodeable hopes to enable.
Otherwise, we end up with a mismatch of resources with goals, as InformationWeek points out:
What about hybrid clouds and cloud bursting, an activity that promises to dramatically change the face of IT spending and human resourcing as we know it? Marquee names like Zynga and DreamWorks are just two pioneers that have managed to optimize their internal infrastructure spend by balancing private and public cloud. Yet only 10% of our survey respondents identify private cloud as a top priority.
Worse, the project that came in at No.12 of 12, with a whopping 2%—launching or upgrading an enterprise social networking platform—is one that has the attention of non-IT partners….We guarantee you that if we had surveyed CMOs and their direct reports instead of CIOs and their reports, social would have been near the top.
Enterprises need to figure out how to do more with less, and that “less” means getting to more productivity with “less money,” which often will necessitate less cumbersome and costly bureaucracy. Nodeable offers one way to accomplish this, and no doubt you can think of others. It’s only as IT becomes more agile and joined-at-the-hip with business requirements that it’s going to be a hero in 2012.
Recently I (Tim, front-end wizard) had the joy of creating our 
We do a fair amount of pre-processing of inbound data to “massage” it into formats that Hadoop can more easily digest, which improves efficiency, among other things.
The problem with treating people like data: Learning from Autonomy’s mistakes
As much as we tout the importance of data in today’s fast-paced markets, Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch is a poignant reminder that people matter, too. A lot.
HP bought Autonomy in late 2011 for $10 billion. Autonomy was one of the UK’s brightest tech stars, but its CEO, Mike Lynch, was known to be somewhat of a difficult personality. How difficult? So bad that Autonomy employees gave Lynch a measly 20 percent approval rating. If the pundits think President Obama has a tough road ahead of him with a nearly 50 percent approval rating, imagine Lynch’s likelihood of getting elected.
No. Way.
In fact, as Wired reports, the only way HP could maximize the value of its $10 billion acquisition was to fire Lynch. This is ironic, given that Autonomy’s business is to “make sense of and process unstructured, ‘human information,’ and draw real business value from that meaning.” The company that enables others to glean meaningful information from unstructured data was at pains to treat its employees as anything more than cogs in a machine, to be tightened and tweaked to force them to perform.
In other words, as much as we may want to boil business down to 1s and 0s, ultimately all business is about meeting human needs, not only as customers but also as employees. Even Nodeable, which ingests machine data, processes it in real-time, and outputs useful insights is ultimately in the business of serving people, not machines.
Autonomy has built a good business based on serving customer needs. But it has started to decline as its employees struggled to enjoy apparently tyrannical working conditions. By showing Lynch the door, HP has taken the first step toward treating both its customers and its employees with respect, which turns out to be very good business.
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