I have just read the article How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot When Presenting to the Board\ on CIO Update\, and I have seen the opportunity to share my experience trying to catch the attention of the Topo Management of my company. Probably, this experience is directly of interest for management people in big companies. But I hop that whatever the size of the company you work for, you an find it of interest.
Let me tell you a story. It was during the early years of the century. Since the data services deployment started in Telefonica Spain (more or less) 2 years before, the installation procedure was the typical in a telco environment: you just needed physical space, connectivity (either SS7 to the radio network, IP or both) and power. This procedure was efficient for telco balckboxes, and was also really fast for the first service platforms installed. But with growing numbers of service being supported, we started to be unable to hold them.|
You must understand that we did not have any rules about OS selection or version (and patching) limitations. And what applies to OS, does also for any kind of middleware: Databases, Application Servers, Web Servers, ... We had 37 different patching level of a single OS (in just to version levels). Why? Because each service came with its own certification products, over its own HW. And, Why could not we run the same certification over agreed products and versions?
Because Time-to-Market is a must when you talk about Telco Value Added Services (a telco VAS is almost everything you can do with a telephone, other than just person to person voice calls or messaging: video, multimedia, downloads, gaming, TV...) and we just cannot, by no means, delay the service launch.
We started a Server Consolidation analysis
with the partnership of Sun Microsystems and, even if I initially thought that it was an impossible mission, SUN demostrated us that there was a solution for our problem. Unfortunately, our Top Management point of view was that without a positive ROI calculation, there could not be a project.
The project plan went back to the Director Commitee 3 times more, and the answer was always: "Yes, it is necessary, but we do not see it. Give it another review and come back in a pair of months" During these revision cycles most of the team members found a few things more interesting for them than wasting their time on this. Finally, I received the responsibility of leading the initiative.
What could I do? Was it possible to success where we had long failure records? Well, fortunately for me I was running a PDD (Management Development Program, Programa de Desarrollo Directivo in spanish) at
IESE Business School, and could understand that when we were speaking about HW, SW, servers, consolidation, or any other technology related questions, our CTO and CEO could only here BLA, BLA, BLA... So we decided to re-focus our proposal to afford 3 principles:
- Future Orientations: we were going to deploy new infrastructure for new services. The former services could be migrated to the new environment when they need new HW or a major SW installation.
- Finantial Perspective: telco services are not fixed costs. They are the investment needed to get new incomes. So the appropriate method to control them is the profitability analysis, not the pure cost analysis.
- Process Management: we focused on ITIL as the framework to build strong management processes that could guarantee to maintain the service levels in the long term.
I must say that if I am writing this today is because we got the approval for the project only 3 months after the latest rejection.
We implemented the new service execution environment, we got clear results in service acquisition cost reduction, most accurate time-to-market and significant availability improvements. We are now a standard into Telefonica Spain and are building the basics for extending the model to the entire group. And I am completely convinced that it would not be a reality without the "revelation" that we need to speak the same language that out Top Managers.
