The other day, I found in Paul Jaillard's blog a sentence that nearly perfectly summarizes what we try to achieve with Wan governance: "When we concentrate on costs, quality decreases - When we concentrate on quality, costs decrease"(*).
A brutal financial approach is a sign of an organization in crisis. It has not been able to adapt in time to the economic situation, for internal (poor management, limited quality of products, unreasonable cost structure...) or external (technology revolution, credit crunch, regulation changes...) reasons. Survival is now the only concern, the true purpose of the enterprise (manufacturing goods, servicing people, etc.) being shadowed. While in enterprises' life, it may happen that situation is so difficult that such emergency decisions must be taken, it is crystal clear that the cost of these savings is extremely high. We cut an arm and a leg to save the body, fair enough - but no wonder if the body will remain handicapped for a long time.
A pure performance approach might be the right one in early stage of an organization with deep pockets: it lies so far away from its goals that any mean to move it forward is welcome, whatever the cost. Here, the priority is to maximize, not to optimize. The bad news is that this policy can only apply for a short time, as the enterprise will either fail - and run out of cash - or succeed and reach its adult stage where external factors (market size, social environment, natural resources, etc.) will start to limit its expansion.
Mature organizations would rather adopt a thoughtful quality approach that balance expenses and benefits, short and long term impacts, direct and indirect improvements. They should praise managers that think and act about what is important for the enterprise (its customers, its products, its financial health…) not just for their own team or career. Of course, it may be seen as a more difficult road, as many parameters have to be taken into account and new questions will arise (starting with an accurate identification of the important needs). However, well aligned with the enterprise's goals and successfully implemented, it makes the difference between good and great organizations.
Applied to network governance, it is the philosophy at the core of autonomic networking and objective-based management systems that provide automated tools to allow teams in charge of the network to spend their time on the objective definition and achievements rather than on the day to day implementation.
The economic impact of good performance across WANs is huge: there is room for amazing improvements here: IT flexibility, users' productivity, bandwidth cost, operation workload, incident reduction, etc. To maximize the benefits, all these aspects have to be optimized globally. I expect to provide you with some examples and figures in further post that would illustrate how to save real money with WAN governance.
(*) From "Le client retrouvé" by Philippe Detrie
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