What LA freeways and your IT infrastructure have in common...

I travel to LA on business most months and naturally spend a few hours every day in the car.. and on many journeys stuck in traffic. For Angelenos it is just part of everyday living and many would think nothing of sitting in traffic for an hour en route to the gym. But they probably wouldn’t wait in line for an hour at a "no reservation" restaurant in Manhattan on a Tuesday night or stoically sit out in a beer garden in a t-shirt on a freezing cold day in June because it "should be" summer in London. Some of the many idiosyncrasies that define city living in different places. Los Angeles was a "city" that grew up alongside the inexorable rise of the automobile and therefore is really built for it with no mass transit system that is feasible to use for 99% of journeys. In many ways LA personified/personify’s (depending on your point of view) the American dream of car centric suburban living - with the added benefit of all year round sunshine. This means that, rather than a true city with a obvious center, Los Angeles is, as the author Dorothy Parker famously stated "72 suburbs in search of a city". So as the LA metro area has, and continues to grow (mainly outward) traffic continues to grow. But this post is not about the traffic, it is about the conditions of the road infrastructure...

Crumbling and historically under invested infrastructure is turning into a major political issue in the US.. and came sharply into focus last year with the collapse of a major road bridge in Minneapolis. Many commentators are comparing the spanking new roads being built in Asia and the Middle East compared to the "Third World quality" roads that some perceive in some US cities. As I hurtled down the 5 (interstate 5) to my morning meeting with traffic already building up at 6 am, I was reminded of the poor state of many freeways in LA with potholes that make you fear for your tires (US spelling for those in the UK)..and life.. Not all roads in LA are bad though.. if you head West on Sunset Blvd the second you see the brown and yellow "welcome to Beverly Hills" sign the road turns from bumpy pot-holed and gray to perfectly smooth black tarmac! Go figure! The Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is now facing a multi-billion budget deficit coupled with an ongoing economic slowdown...fixing those roads may not be a priority or even an option (the schools budget is already being squeezed). This is a good analogy for IT infrastructure and associated investment cycles...

As IT Infrastructure is often the "hidden" part of an IT organization (ie the users don’t interact directly with it) it can sometimes be an area of under-investment or the first place where budget cuts bite. Many IT Infrastructure leaders will know that they are often asked to do more with less and patch up ageing infrastructure so that the IT budget can be deployed to areas that have greater visibility to the business. Behind the scenes there may be daily fire fighting to keep this infrastructure working and the business may not see it... but this is a very dangerous game to play. By not investing sufficiently in infrastructure you are potentially storing up problems for the future and will also making it harder (and more expensive) to quickly deploy new services in the future if you have an old and inflexible platform. During the last recession many IT leaders took the decision to hold off on infrastructure investment in the face of significantly reduced budgets and job insecurity for all. When investment dollars started flowing again many had to a significant ramp up period while they got their infrastructure ready. This in some cases placed an unacceptable delay on deployment of new products and services and some businesses missed windows of opportunity. In the worst case scenarios the constant "holding together with band aids" of infrastructure meant that some infrastructures suffered serious outages and became very unreliable which caused serious credibility issues for CIOs and in some cases cost their jobs. Like those filled in potholes.. they will work for a bit but you have to resurface the road completely at some point.

I hear some of you say..well who wants to go to the board to get approval for major infrastructure investment when times are tough? My response is that smart CIOs should, wherever possible, build an ongoing program of incremental infrastructure investment and refresh into every budget cycle. If you have a predictable spend then it means you can better engage with partners/vendors and gain preferential pricing (due their visibility of ongoing deal flow) and your IT organization can better plan for the future. A rolling refresh will make it easy to attract and retain talent in your infrastructure organization too as they see you as a dynamic firm with ongoing opportunities to learn new skills. Finally, you probably won’t have to go through a wholesale infrastructure refresh as you will have been gradually replacing equipment as you go.

So when you go to make that business case to the CFO maybe you should use that analogy.. but don’t bother if they live and work in Beverly Hills - they won’t be nearly as sympathetic!