Innovation Is Pointless Without Infrastructure Investment

2 October 2011 by 4 Comments

A while ago, Greg posted a picture of a fancy, self-cleaning London public convenience.  This is a perfect metaphor for what I am about to rant about.  This is the height of ablutionary innovation.  Self-cleaning and deodorizing.  Pleasant and convenient.  Presenting the user with the best possible excretory client experience in the public space.  However, without adequate investment in the behind-the-scenes infrastructure, all this innovation is just so much (ahem) crap.

Step into my office...

For as long as I can remember, I have been attending conferences and seminars where the buzzword is “innovation”.  Innovation to increase productivity, to improve user experience, to improve the business bottom line.  All very interesting, but invariably upon arrival, the innovation seems to be outside the network space.  Let’s face the reality here.  Networking (and most other IT infrastructure) is plumbing.  And this is appropriate, given that much of what passes for “innovation” is crap, as far as I can tell.  To be more specific, most of what is publicized as innovation is, in fact, marketing.  “Real” innovation in the IT infrastructure space, at least that which has a tangible impact on us as networking professionals is driven by the need to find solutions to real-world problems caused by the marketing “bells and whistles” innovation.

What do I mean by that?  Take for example a lot of the “innovative” platforms I’ve seen come and go over the past few years.  In the education space, these have included on-line learning (Blackboard, Moodle, etc), mobile devices, interactive voice and video.  Each in their turn have been called “innovative”.  But all of the innovation is at the front end.  Take the on-line learning management systems.  When you break it down, to my inexpert eye, what do these systems comprise?  Surprise, surprise, they are a honking great database behind some clever APIs and web presentation.  This is not innovative.  Support for mobile devices – where is the innovation here?  Really, someone tell me.  Isn’t it just an exercise in reformatting for a small screen?  (Apologies to everyone I’ve offended in the past couple of paragraphs).

For us as network engineers, the innovation we need is in the plumbing.  It needs to be real, and address issues or problems.  Invariably it is driven by the unintended consequences of what I call the front-end innovation.  But while the money and the prestige within the organization goes to the front-end innovators, we infrastructure people need to wait for the crumbs to filter down to us.  Want multiple nodes to increase uptime?  Fine, the industry develops, and we need to buy, load balancers.  Your Moodle instance needs to replicate that obscenely bloated back-end database?  More bandwidth, please.  The Layer 2 domain needs to grow beyond all reasonable expectations?  We need things like OTV, QFabric and FabricPath.  Is all this hardware hard to manage?  Virtualization can help.  Need to support lots more mobile devices?  802.11n and more access points everywhere!  So networking vendors are out there innovating, but the audience is small and the traction low when it compares to the front-end, public-facing innovation.

How many times have you been told that such-and-such a team is about to implement a insert innovative new thingamabob or doodad here only to discover that the budget doesn’t include the required ten-gig links to their new blade enclosure or that this will break your load balancer but there aren’t any funds for solving that?  Or the new innovation is implemented before the infrastructure impact is even assessed, leading to poor outcomes all round?

This is a fundamental problem we have as packet plumbers.  Bells-and-whistles and front-end innovation is all well and good (I grudgingly admit), but without the concomitant innovation and investment in infrastructure, these things die on the vine.  Too often, infrastructure is the afterthought in the innovation equation at the management level, and we need to fight hard to bring it to the front-of-mind of those controlling strategy and budget.  You have to get the infrastructure right, or that new innovative app will get stuck in the S-bend.

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About Matthew Mengel

Matthew was a Senior Network Engineer for a regional educational institution in Australia for over 15 years, working with Cisco equipment across many different product areas. However, in April 2011 he resigned, and is took seven months of long service leave to de-stress and re-boot before moving back into the job market. Currently working as the Network Engineer for a non-profit organization, he is studying for the CCIE R&S. He does Warhammer 40K miniatures painting for which he has little talent, but enjoys nonetheless. Astronomy is another interest, and he completed a Master of Philosophy in Astrophysics in 2005. He is on twitter infrequently as @mengelm.

  • http://blog.ioshints.info Ivan Pepelnjak

    Well, while I hear what you’re saying ;) , the fundamental problem is somewhere else:

    A) like most other nerds, we have extremely poor communication skills. No wonder the iPad people get the money and we don’t;
    B) we always try to fix the problems McGyver style (and are usually stupid enough to be proud of our prowess instead of figuring out how short-term heroism will kick us back in the longer term)
    C) we rarely get back to our managers with a well-reasoned business proposal saying “you can save $$$ or increase the business revenue by $$$ (or whatever other tangible thing) by implementing XXX”

    • Matthew Mengel

      True enough, but in my experience, your points B and C create a loop it is hard to break, and getting to point B is more often than not forced upon us.  That is, when your well-reasoned business plan is rejected because of budget issues or managerial myopia, we are forced to go all McGyver as there is no other option.  I have tried the path of not doing this and standing my ground on a business case or proposal, but in my experience, management has the power and the purse, and you eventually have to give in or resign.  This then undermines the next business case you present – after all, you managed to do X last time without implementing Y.  A feedback loop that is self-defeating.

      Part of the problem is indeed in the poor communication.  But it is inherently easier for a marketer to show non-technical management (who usually outrank the IT management) how whiz-bang product X will benefit the business.  It is much harder to convince them that a new load balancer (for example) is needed now before the next whiz-bang thing breaks the old one.  Proactive incremental improvement is perhaps the most difficult of skills.

    • Steve B

      In relation to C I’d say many Network Engineers just don’t have the knowledge of the financials as we are kept out of the loop due to being classed as “techies”

      Apart from being lucky enough to have forward thinking management that would enable the sharing of information I’m not sure what the solution is.

  • RedSneakers18

    So true!!
    How many solutions fail miserably because the networking to support existing and new infrastructure has not been analyzed/planned for properly. The application or new system was evaluated from one point of view and without a collaboritive analysis from all of the Infrastructure environments.