Everyone talks about innovation, considered the nirvana of business success and advancement. The problem, however, is that many attempts at innovation are often clumsy and unimaginative - and often more expensive and mind numbing than the advantages the innovation can deliver.
A recent treatise on the topic by Gartner, for example, treats innovation with all the excitement of a year-long operating system installation project: “Best practices in establishing a culture of innovation require actions in five key aspects of management and leadership: strategy, values, workplace, commitment and rewards... Organizations aspiring to become innovators must increase their awareness of and begin to make headway in all these aspects before initiating an innovation program.”
Wonderful, somebody please wake me up when we get there.
I am more partial to Tom Peters’ take, who represents the break-all-the-rules and destroy-creatively school of innovation: “Change the rules before somebody else does... ‘Organize’ for performance and customer satisfaction… ‘Disorganize’ for renewal and innovation… The point is not to ‘push the envelope or to ‘think outside the box.’ The point is to rip up the envelope and burn the box.”
We have a lot more to gain by thinking way beyond boundaries of our organizational norms. This certainly applies to IT, which was made to be a destroyer of paradigms, not as a faster alternative to paperwork.
It’s fascinating to see innovations - often new, simpler ways to look at problems - pop up across the industry. About a decade ago, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with IBM’s Irving Wladawsky-Berger, when he was charged with building IBM’s first line of supercomputers. Did he commission IBM’s manufacturing plants to create powerful new processors and a fancy new chassis? No - instead he took pieces of technologies already laying around IBM – mainly IBM Unix machines (then called RS/6000s, now called System p boxes) – and lashed them together with a high-speed switch. Presto, powerful massively parallel processing with little additional investment in R&D.
I also remember a few years back when some people were talking about delivering storage area networks over IP networks, versus the expensive Fibre Channel networks in vogue at the time. Many analysts pooh-poohed the notion as too slow for storage network traffic. These days, of course, IP SANs are the norm.
We need more such burn-the-box thinking to drive return on investment in IT. Here are some other, more recent, examples of innovations for IT that have come to light in recent times that required little new investment beyond already sunken costs, that may make a difference:
Data centers in a box. Yes, we’re talking about thinking well beyond the box, but it’s worth noting one of the most innovative new data center ideas to come along in a long time. Vendors including IBM, Dell, Sun and Microsoft are now proposing and offering complete data centers, loaded with servers and network gear, stuffed right into a portable container. A standard 20×8×8-foot shipping container is “ideal” for this purpose, since not only is it is rugged and built to withstand ocean voyages, but also “relatively inexpensive and environmentally robust.” Upon delivery to a site, a data center container could simply be attached to the network, chilled water, and powered up. Each container can be fully equipped with networking gear, compute nodes, and persistent storage.” Why not put data centers on wheels, a take them to wherever they’re needed? These data centers, literally housed in portable shipping containers, can be trucked and parked at a corporate site, and quickly be up and running. Microsoft recently announced publicly its plans to build a completely containerized production data center near Chicago. The new data center containers will house up to 1,000 servers, said Microsoft’s James Hamilton. Hamilton has been Microsoft’s thought leader on the data center in a box proposition.
Data center heat exchanges. There’s a lot of concern about the power drain required to cool data centers. One Swiss hosting company figured out a way to take the excess heat coming out of its data center and heat several nearby swimming pools. IBM instigated the program, and the data center is expected to create 2,800 megawatts of wasted heat each year.
Community-based research. At a recent seminar, noted IT author Don Tapscott offered an example of a mining company, Goldcorp, that was reaching the end of its run. The company’s in-house staff of geologists was unable to identify new sources of minerals within the company’s holdings. The CEO decided to turn to the community at large for assistance, opening up all the information it had on its properties, including geological data, and offered a reward to anyone out on the net who could help locate new sources. Geologists and non-geologists alike offered information that led to new finds, and the company has grown from $90 million to $10 billion in assets.
Self-encrypting drives. Data encryption is one of the most vexing challenges in managing security in today’s wide range of systems. Companies are investing millions of dollars in encryption technologies, because they are scared of the regulatory and legal implications of having exposed data somewhere in their archives. Seagate Technology recently announced a solution in which data is automatically encrypted every time, via self-encrypting drives. Most drives eventually leave data center, and effectively overwriting or magnetically erasing data can be time-consuming. The new feature would automatically encrypt all data using 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard encryption when the drive is removed or shut down. “The minute that drive loses power, it is encrypted,” said a spokesperson.
Mashups on mainframes – why not? Mashups are seen as lightweight, user-designed applications that run on browser front ends. Now, one enterprise vendor provides a way to build and deploy mashups from mainframes. Information Builders announced the release of a front-end tool that leverages Google Maps with mainframe data and applications.
Technology has reached a point that encourages innovation on a grand, paradigm-altering scale. If your company is hidebound and obsessed with squeezing out numbers from old ways of thinking, maybe its time for some creative destruction.
About the Author:
Joe McKendrick edits 5 Minute Briefing: Data Center, serving the SHARE community. He can be reached at Joe@dbta.com.
