Gmail down! Understand your cloud.

I am sure you have heard of Gmail's outage yesterday and the ensuing twitter explosion, I will be commenting a little later on the use of Twitter and other social media sites to get the message out, and apologize to our customers.

I write this post to point back to a post I made a week or so ago about cloud computing and understanding what you are getting into.

Google will be refunding corporate buyers 3 days of cost of the service, but like any commodity business this will be far less than the cost of the impact the outage had on most businesses.

If you are thinking of getting deep into the cloud, make sure you are not the company without a generator when the power goes out, all the electric company will do is offer apologies and your bill will be a little cheaper that month.




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Tax code can encourage SMaaP?

Expenditures in most US businesses are one of 2 types Operational expenditure (OPEX)and Capital expenditure (CAPEX), the following are the wikipedia definitions of the two, I should note I am not qualified to describe the US tax code in any usable detail.

An operating expense, operating expenditure, operational expense, operational expenditure or OPEX is an on-going cost for running a product, business, or system. Its counterpart, a capital expenditure (CAPEX), is the cost of developing or providing non-consumable parts for the product or system. For example, the purchase of a photocopier is the CAPEX, and the annual paper and toner cost is the OPEX. For larger systems like businesses, OPEX may also include the cost of workers and facility expenses such as rent and utilities

The Conventional wisdom in the current economic climate is that Opex is "better" than CAPEX, IE it is easier to spend some operational money, Capital expenditures usually require sign off. (see cloud computing)

However I have consistently run into a different issue, Operational expenses are very difficult to add to, and if a quick straw poll on twitter is anything to go by, I am not the only one.

Hiring a new manager for a "help-desk" for example is a decision with long term consequences and though the cost is quite small it is usually a hard slog to increase headcount, however buying a new software suite, implementing it and hiring the consultants to advise on its deployment are all capitalised and therefore require only single sign off at the inception of the "project".

This seems to be another incentive leading to SaaP "Service as a Project":

• Failure is not an option - the project must have "ROI" and this ROI must be defined in a return of capital. A real issue when your starting point defined by lack of financial data.
• Service is not a project - treating great service as a project that has an end has probably felled more ITIL adoptions than any other, understanding your customers and users, the service you provide, how it's used and making it great is way of life... not a project.
• Not everything is able to be capitalized - This is a real kicker, there are some things the cannot be capitalized, I believe this can incentivize some organisations to buy more software and spend less time staffing for the new organisation.

As always just a quick thought, let me know yours.



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SMaaP - "Service Management as a Project"

I have decided to coin a new term and it is: SMaaP "Service Manaagement as a Project", I think this is such a common occurrence we need a term for it.

I am hearing too many discussions about implementing ITIL, even this round table by "experts" has to be corrected by Aiden Lawes as they are talking about using, implementing and the benefits of ITIL (18:40).

Hopefully the occurrence of SMaaP will get fewer and fewer but I have my doubts.

File this post under rant.

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