Recession-ready IT
This page is a companion piece to the article written for BD in March 2009. The headings in each section follow the headings in the article. The article can be found on the BD site here.
The article has the following structure; use the links to jump to the notes relevant to that section.
We will be discussing issues brought up in the article at our next forum on the subject of "A blueprint for IT services at Design Companies" The forum will be held at the Building Design Centre on 21 April 2009 from 4-6pm. If you wish to attend please email info@campbell-lange.net.
The article has at its heart the idea the IT should be considered an integral part of any company's operational strategy.
Harvard Business School's study of 2005-2006, entitled "Why IT Matters in Midsized Firms", states this idea in the following terms:
… the amount a company spends on IT is a poor indicator of IT functionality and business impact. It is easy to spend a considerable amount of money on technology with very little improvement in the functional capability of the business … the best firms couple the design of their information technology system with the design of the firm.
Infrastructure: The need for infrastructure monitoring and reporting.
We recommend the use of dashboard reports, such as the report below, to give management a high-level view of how their IT services are performing.
Data Storage requirements are growing fast : what to do.
Storage divides very roughly into two sorts: expensive, fast storage
based on SCSI or SAS disks, or cheap slow storage based on SATA or IDE
disks. Most practices have arrays of the former, when SATA disks can be
combined in very fast disk arrays providing huge quantities of storage.
For instance commodity arrays can achieve well over 400MB/s throughput
using SATA disks. This is more than adequate for most file servers,
although admittedly not suitable for large mail or database
installations. SATA arrays can save a lot of money, as a typical SAS
300GB drive costs more than 400 pounds. One can get almost two and a
half terabytes of enterprise class SATA storage for the same amount of
money. Additionally, SATA arrays will soon be supplied with hugely fast
SSD disks that will cache data before writing it out to the SATA arrays.
This may mean in future that SAS disks may only be used for specialist
or database-centric uses where general disk IO is required to be
exceptionally fast.
» Wikipedia on SAS
» Wikipedia on SATA
» Coraid AOE at 200-600MB/sec
Services : Virtualisation of services permits less reliance on hardware.
Virtualisation is a very interesting topic. We covered some aspects
of it in a recent IT forum at our offices, which run from an overview of
how different sorts of virtualisation work, to terms such as
"hypervisor", to a hands-on demonstration on some virtualisation
technologies such as Xen, VirtualIron and VMWare Infrastructure.
There is huge competition in the virtualisation market, as Microsoft
enters the fray with its Hyper-V technology and many other hardware
manufacturers and alternative operating system providers turning to
commercial versions of the open-source Xen technology, notably Citrix
XenServer. These two, together with a host of other solutions are
competing with the current de facto standard, VMWare.
If you wish to move services easily between servers it is, at
present, probably best to trial VMWare Infrastructure and Citrix
XenServer. The latter is free.
» View the virtualisation forum notes
» Citrix XenServer
» VMWare Infrastructure
» Microsoft Hyper-V
Telephony : Routing calls over the internet provides huge cost savings.
We use Asterisk, ISDN server cards from Sangoma and Snom phones to
save a lot on our phone bills. How did we do it? We bought a few copies
of "The Future of Telephony" by O'Reilly (ISBN 13: 9780596510480) and
subscribed to the Asterisk mailing list.
» Asterisk book at O'Reilly's website
» Sangoma ISDN cards
» Snom phones
Online Apps
Find best in class online applications to manage your business from
anywhere. Candidates for consideration could include Axomic/OpenAsset
(image management), NewForma (information management), Union Square
(ditto), Rapport3 (practice management) and ProjectMinder (management
accounts) -- any many others. These applications can allow design
companies to improve their operational efficiency without trying to
reinvent the wheel themselves. Several suppliers of web apps attended
our November 2008 forum.
» November 2008 forum notes
» OpenAsset/Axomic image management
» NewForma (Oce)
» Union Square Workspace
» Rapport3 by Cubic Interactive
» IRIS ProjectMinder
People : Invest in people rather than licences.
One could suggest that the new BS1192 standard (which sets out methodology
for managing the production, distribution and quality of construction
information) is simply trying to bring some of the innovations of the 1980s
manufacturing world to the way in which building professionals exchange
information.
Ironically, companies like Toyota have shown that to become
exceptionally good at manufacturing, one has to base one's business on
developing people.
So while BS1192 is interesting in its own right, one can't simply become
efficient by buying software. It is worth considering investing in your
staff and improving how your business does things first. Using open
source software you can do both.
» Wikipedia's page on open source
» An open source operating system with 25113 applications
» Wikipedia's page on 'The Toyota Way'