Building IT Resilience: The Six Core Tenets of InfraOps

In the previous article I spelled out what InfraOps was. I ended by saying there were three key insights those using the InfraOps approach needed to make meaningful progress. The first was to absorb the lessons and integrate the insights of the tenets of InfraOps into your broader business strategy. There are six of them.

1. Possible Progress over Static Incrementalism

To excel at InfraOps it's crucial to envision how much progress is possible by setting aside all constraints except for the laws of nature (physics) and regulations (law). This mindset allows you to explore the realm of possibilities without overstepping boundaries. By methodically reintroducing constraints one at a time, you can creatively navigate or eliminate them, inching closer to your ideal outcome with each step. This approach ensures that the solutions you devise are as effective as possible, maximizing progress toward your desired outcome.

This approach is quite different from the common practice in corporate settings of incrementalism, where marginal improvements in the current state (under the assumption it's already well optimized) are favored over transformative changes. This mindset limits you by focusing on minor enhancements rather than striving for the best possible outcome.

To build a high-performing InfraOps framework, you must prioritize foundational system re-design that embodies the principle of pursuing the maximum possible progress. By doing so, you can make more significant advancements towards your desired outcomes, setting a new standard for what's achievable in InfraOps.

2. Start with Asset Provenance

And what are those desired outcomes? To avoid future complications and operational waste, it's essential to have a smart system that perfectly describes your IT assets: what you own, where it's located, its commercial history, compliance history, current depreciated value, and entire lifecycle (whatever that may have been). The pandemic highlighted the critical nature of this tenet, as many organizations struggled to reallocate assets efficiently due to sourcing challenges.

The process of moving assets across borders requires meticulous documentation, including original import papers and licenses linked to specific serial numbers, alongside current depreciated valuations. These examples underscore the importance of maintaining real-time asset provenance to avoid unnecessary hurdles during asset reallocation or movement in the future.

Without clear provenance, you risk future firefighting due to administrative and operational debt. A comprehensive global asset provenance system ensures you're prepared for future adjustments. Maybe you’d like to resell hardware before its end-of-life for newer technology, centralize your end-of-life processes, or simply move your technical infrastructure across markets for load-balancing purposes. Whatever your goals, systemic asset provenance not only saves you from potential headaches but also positions you to adapt swiftly and efficiently to changing business needs.

3. Hardware is a Commodity

Asset provenance also creates the frame for the next tenet: treating hardware as a commodity. When considering the nature of your assets, spanning your network, storage, computing, and end-user tech spread across your global IT topography, it's plain to see that hardware is a commodity.

Technical hardware should not be consumed as if it were a business service, because it’s not. The idea that multinational corporations pay more for hardware because it is consumed in non-US locations is irrational and unacceptable. Unlike legal services, which understandably vary in price due to geographical and jurisdictional differences, hardware commodities should not be subject to such fluctuations.

Recognizing hardware as a fungible commodity leads to improved procurement strategies, material handling methods, and internal supply chain modeling. Treating hardware as a commodity means nothing is stopping you from sourcing in whatever market you like and shipping from there. This sourcing shift frees you to begin centralizing your integration work, reducing operational expenses and allowing your stakeholders to focus on more valuable activities.

4. Engineers Should Engineer

Treating hardware as a commodity is not the only tenet devoted to identifying the right InfraOps role for something or someone. Engineers should engineer is another tenet that speaks to returning engineers to their rightful place – outside the InfraOps framework.

The expertise of engineers is crucial for designing, operating, and securing your technical systems, and they should be spending almost no time on InfraOps work. However, too often they are bogged down with tasks involving the immediate challenges of IT infrastructure operations, but which fall outside their core responsibilities. InfraOps work is therefore crucial because without it engineers cannot do the job they were hired to do.

These highly skilled and valuable stakeholders should not be sidetracked and forced to divert their focus from value creation to managing chaos. The drift into non-core engineering activities usually comes from the need to combat disorder and verify system readiness. InfraOps practices ensure that some of your most valuable people are fully engaged in their essential work and not sidelined by preventable inefficiencies.

5. Embracing a Systems Approach

If everyone is already so busy, who should do the administrative work engineers are currently doing? That’s the wrong question. Shifting from decentralized to centralized and ultimately industrialized work methods for InfraOps is crucial to reduce the administrative burden all together.

Currently, most IT organizations operate on a decentralized craft basis, where tasks are handled individually in isolation, often leading to a lack of transparency and coherence across projects. This fragmented approach results in siloed teams operating without full awareness of each other's activities, compounded by a procurement process that involves an unwieldy number of global vendors, and exacerbated by a reliance on email to “make work.”

Such inefficiencies point to a systemic failure in your current design of work processes, protocols, and systems. The irony is that the principles of synchronization, essential to the success of modern network engineering, are often overlooked in operational strategies. You can leverage automation and industrial methods to streamline your processes and develop a roadmap toward more synchronized operations. This transition not only reduces the administrative burden but allows you to focus your efforts on more impactful, value-adding activities.

6. Increase your Sovereignty

The final tenet of InfraOps speaks directly to your broader business strategy. In our 21^st-century business environment, sovereignty over critical operations is important. Companies that carve out competitive advantages often do so by daring to invest in innovative yet underappreciated ideas. Success in these ventures typically requires a deep understanding of a specific domain and the autonomy to influence it significantly.

Not every business function requires direct control, but critical areas like your technical infrastructure certainly do. This vision is crucial for addressing security, supply chain integrity, sourcing flexibility, and innovation speed. Gaining autonomy over your technical commodities allows for consolidated purchasing, negotiation leverage with the Channel, and better strategies for asset management.

Working to increase your InfraOps sovereignty opens new opportunities for efficiency, cost savings, and future flexibility. By asserting greater control over procurement, asset management, and the InfraOps landscape in general, organizations can unlock the ability to navigate the technical commodity market more freely, bypass traditional consumption models, and achieve better outcomes.

These are the tenets that should guide your stakeholders in delivering the best outcomes possible. Who those stakeholders are and how they can use those tenets to reimagine what progress is possible is the subject of my next article.