The power of habits

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. -- Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science

Is your IT shop filled with hammer-wielders?

The long-term economic inevitability of public cloud computing can't be denied, yet many IT departments act as if the cloud isn't quite "ready." Much of this uncertainty is mob-based; you sound smart if you shift into passive voice and declare "there are still questions about the [security/scalability/maturity] of public cloud offerings." I pressed a job applicant this week, who made such a declaration, to offer concrete examples of such questions from his personal experience. No matter how I asked, he answered some form of, "everyone else thinks it's not ready, so I guess I think it's not ready."

This form of confirmation bias - "we can't use a cloud offering because we don't do things that way" - comes from ingrained habits. I'll admit that I still tend to power through any Salesforce.com data loading exercise using their official data loader tool alongside Excel, even as colleagues have pointed out the merits of more sophisticated solutions. I keep doing it "my way" because I'm familiar with it. Still, I acknowledge that's not the smartest or most efficient approach for a large-scale project. When it comes to data loading, I'm a hammer-wielder. 

This can be an expensive, and ultimately limiting, bad habit. "By far the biggest challenge is shifting IT processes, not in grabbing new technology," and "we still have a hand-crafted, artisan approach to many of our applications," said Carlos Matos of Kaiser Permanente last week. The "artisan" approach, otherwise known as "we build everything internally," leads many developers to break out their Java IDEs and start working at the infrastructure level to solve any technology problem. But the history of computer science is a glorious march up the abstraction ladder. Higher-level abstractions, like structured languages, object-oriented design and relational databases, continually displace lower-level abstractions like assembly code and flat storage. Cling too long to too low a rug on the ladder and you're on the wrong side of history.

Today, the new abstraction layers are software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Put what you can at the SaaS layer. Customize as necessary with PaaS. When the platform services won't suffice, drop down to IaaS, but minimize your exposure. Developers who think "code first" are holding their companies back. "Corporate data centers are filled with people whose skills and livelihoods are based on older technology and ways of doing things," said Steve Lohr in one of two provocative New York Times articles on cloud computing last week. Lohr was arguing that cloud computing adoption is being slowed by a variation on the old Upton Sinclair witticism, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

The other interesting Lohr post quotes VMware CEO Paul Maritz, "In the long run, companies want to get out of the digital plumbing business...but that has not really played out yet." Cloud computing helps IT to flip the usual ratio, where around 70 percent of spend goes toward maintenance and operations - just keeping the lights on. Stephanie Overby at CIO Magazine recently provides numerous examples of large companies turning to cloud computing because "businesses need to put time and money into growth; they don't want to invest time or money in IT." CIOs have said for years that they want to be true business partners. It'd be a shame if their own IT staffs' habits were getting in the way.

Glenn Weinstein is the CTO and co-founder of Appirio, where he oversees the CloudWorks and Cloud Management Center product lines as well as internal IT.