A few days back, a senior editor of a respected publication that also conducts small gatherings of CIOs asked me if I would be interested in attending a dinner sponsored by a structured cable vendor. He spoke in jest wondering if he would be able to gather an audience numbering double digits. I kind of concurred with him as cabling was the last thing on my mind. I don’t remember when was the last time I reviewed cabling standards or attended a meeting with a cabling vendor.

I must have written many times on the new age CIO and the transformation over the last decade. I think that petabytes of information exists on this subject which any search engine will throw up. No event is complete without a discussion on what are or should be the CIO’s role or priorities. Everyone agrees that the IT leader is a business leader first and technology expert later. As a leader, s/he is expected to demonstrate behaviors no different from the CEO, CFO or any other CXO.

The CIO through his/her team gathers expertise on various technologies and related domains. These teams typically along with principal vendors, external service providers, and system integrators form an ecosystem that provides the basic and advanced solutions that enable and empower any enterprise. In every enterprise, the deputies who form the IT management and operations team ensure that every day billing happens, manufacturing plants hum, goods leave the warehouse, call centers receive customers, sales people sell, finance teams collate figures, and external partners get the information due. In a nutshell, the world continues to move on despite random failures that occur at all levels.

In today’s world where most technology components (be it hardware, software, or connectivity) find it difficult to differentiate approaching commoditization, choices are influenced by the existing long-term relationships between enterprises or people; or a significant price difference. Quality of service is the only other determinant factor. New disruptive paradigms in the last few decades have kept every CIO on his/her toes to keep the enterprise competitive and current. But then there are some who haven’t.

So coming back to our battery vendor and the cable manufacturer, are these critical and high on the list of priorities of the CIO to demand his/her attention? Should s/he undertake strategic meetings with the management or board on the kind of cabling that is being laid or the merits of one battery technology over the other? What would happen if the battery bank failed and servers went down or storage disconnected due to a loose patch cord?

I believe that the IT infrastructure head and his/ her team under the CIO are tasked and are or should be empowered to deal with this. The ball, however, always stops with the CIO being answerable. But then every CXO depends on his/ her teams to deliver and does not necessarily get down to micro-management. On an analogous note, is the CMO in trouble if lights on an outdoor hoarding go off?

I am sure that most of you had a wonderful time enjoying your favorite activities with your friends, relatives, and even strangers. The number of messages (SMS, tweets, emails, Web posts, etc) multiplied over the weekend. And in almost all cases (I am sure there were a few exceptions), they were delivered to the intended recipients. All this was enabled by the IT infrastructure which worked seamlessly, despite the additional load generated by hundreds of messages, which implied a multiple factor loading over average transaction loads on the servers and networks.

No one really planned for this surge, unlike the planning that typically goes into catering for month end or quarter end processing. It just worked!

Does it mean that most IT organizations deploy infrastructure that is way over the required average load?

Most analyst reports indicate that average usage of the IT infrastructure ranges from 5-30%. This is where the virtualization story promises to deliver higher utilization levels. So how would one explain the success for highly virtualized shops, where utilization is higher than the numbers stated by analysts and vendors? Did we receive messages sent on the last day of the year after a few days?

At least in my case, I know for sure that the messages that I sent out (about 10 times the emails I send in a day) within a span of 20 minutes — all of them were received by the intended recipients within a few minutes.

The bogey of capacity planning, utilization levels, right sizing of servers, etc. for our messaging and collaboration platforms would appear to be highly overstated. Most IT shops play it safe, and buffer in more than 200% capacity in such infrastructure. However, the same hypothesis does not hold good for business transaction systems, which do tend to feel the pressure over month or quarter end sales cycles. Users end up at the receiving end during these peaks, and the reactions to such planned upgrades are slower than expected.

Maybe, cloud-based models for compute power on demand are an answer to such issues. But their deployment still remains experimental (at best), for mission critical transactional applications like ERP, financial accounting and supply chain management. As the interoperability of applications and base infrastructure improves, with consistent bandwidth becoming available on demand at affordable rates, the sizing problem will slowly die a natural death.

CIOs should review their capacity planning assumptions in the New Year as they engage with vendors and users, learn from the past, and take some calculated risks. I am sure that sooner or later, these questions would be posed; the answers may not be very easy.