There are many action items in planning and preparation that corporate IT management can take for the implementation of on demand and autonomic computing. IT management can take the steps necessary to take early advantage of the benefits and savings that will be accrued with autonomic computing. These steps should be considered essential prerequisites that IT management must invest in, rather than waiting for full autonomic technology to be delivered to their doorstep. For IT departments to be successful with autonomic computing will require major shifts in IT organizations, infrastructures, and resources. This work must begin now—for there is much to accomplish. Among the essential steps are the following:
Assess the overall state of on demand and autonomic computing. Conduct an enterprise-wide complexity study.
Integrate on demand and autonomic computing into the corporate and IT strategic plan.
Begin to construct best practices for autonomic development, architectures, and infrastructure.
Conduct and document a full-scale, corporation-wide complexity reduction study with recommendations for autonomic implementation improvements.
Review all IT metrics data, service level agreements data, and identify data needed for autonomic implementation.
Consider restructuring the IT organization to create an internal corporate autonomic group staffed with full-time equivalents (FTEs).
Map IT services to their underlying processes and begin to monitor end-to-end service levels.
Focus on improving IT management process maturity.
Implement a consolidation strategy for servers and storage. Consider introducing workload management.
Implement automated server provisioning through server configuration management.
Rather than waiting for autonomic computing to become available, these actions can be taken immediately. Incremental benefits can thus be achieved within the current IT organization. Specific, realistic milestones should be put in place and announced in planning documents. As the IT department changes, the costs and benefits can be monitored and documented. IT departments that do not take these essential and necessary steps will become less competitive, and the transition to these newer technologies will be painful and difficult. These IT departments will become prime targets for outsourcing to external service providers who have already adopted and implemented autonomic technology.
