Conversations from The EDGE: Treating the IT Ecosystem as an Actual Ecosystem

The process of integrating new systems into existing ecosystems is detailed, by its very nature. On today’s installment of Service Logic’s Conversations from The EDGE, host Sean Heath spoke with Greg Crumpton and StrategITcom’s Carrie Goetz to discuss the nature of an IT ecosystem and the challenges that present themselves during these implementations.

“I think ‘ecosystems’ is really sort of an oxymoron, right? We know that it’s an ecosystem, but people don’t treat it that way. Budgets are still very much siloed. There’s still kind of a component where Facilities does their thing and IT does their thing, but nobody really treats it as a cohesive ecosystem,” Goetz said.

One of the biggest keys to success, according to Crumpton, is getting everyone on the same page as early as possible.

“You want to be there for that first conversation, so that you start setting expectations early, and you’re also, while you’re explaining those expectations, setting requirements. You’re finding out more and more detail,” he said. “You’re getting all that detail as you go to help build that formula right out of the gate that first time.”

Recent outages with massive, cloud-based companies, shine a spotlight on proper data center planning according to Goetz.

“Outages are always preventable, but throwing additional redundancy at an outage is not always the best way to go,” she said. “If IT has done their job and they fail over to other sites, then you can minimize the impact of that outage. But, if you put all of your eggs in one basket and the handle breaks: you’re going to be scrambling, right?”

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