Meet William Dupley, Digital Strategist
William Dupley is a former Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada Cloud Chief Technologist, and has managed IT transformation and strategic planning for various Fortune 500 organizations and government groups worldwide. He’s also a member of the Open Data Centre Alliance, whose authorship team recently released several new publications on Hybrid IT Transformational planning and Cloud Maturity model development
This month, FoxNet has the privilege of featuring William’s insights at two afternoon events in Brantford on March 15, and Waterloo on March 23.
We sat down with William to discuss the hybrid IT movement, and he provided an intriguing non-vendor perspective on developing a business model that accommodates agile IT. William is passionate about helping IT execs plan and execute hybrid IT models, while proactively managing potential barriers to transforming the business model.
Q: How would you define hybrid IT?
William: Hybrid IT is essentially the integration of multiple services into one integrated IT enablement technology. Those services can include IT services from your internal data centre, external public cloud providers, and SaaS providers.
Q: What should C-level executives know about hybrid IT?
It’s important for people to understand that there’s a direct relationship between your IT model and the success of your business. The average life of a business is much shorter than it was decades ago; currently, the average life is about 14.5 years. And one of the primary reasons businesses fail is because they aren’t willing to confront the impact of the digital economy in light of their current business model.
“In a digital economy where software can change multiple times in a day, a company can’t have an IT model that takes years to evolve in response to technology changes.”
In order to survive, a company must be willing to reexamine, and even rebuild, their current business and the IT model that supports it. A hybrid IT model is the key to enabling new business models but it could differ dramatically from company to company, depending on what each company’s existing IT infrastructure looks like. The key principle behind hybrid IT is that it’s flexible and agile; an innovative hybrid IT operating model can be crafted for a company in almost any situation.
In a digital economy where software may be changed multiple times in a day, a company can’t have an IT model that takes years to evolve in response to business and technology changes. A well-designed hybrid IT operating model must give a company the ability to produce fundamental new capabilities in its business model very quickly.
Q: So what are some of these challenges of transforming your IT model?
William: There are five major areas of change that must occur when transforming to a hybrid IT operating model: Hybrid Delivery, Hybrid Application workloads, Hybrid DevOps, Hybrid Service Management, and Hybrid Infrastructure. When making the transition to a hybrid IT model, these five areas of business operations must change to address the fact new applications ecosystem workloads are now delivered from private and public cloud service providers. Additionally, service levels for these application ecosystems have changed; at one point, business models could tolerate some downtimes, but day-to-day operations now expect no slow time, let alone down time. These services must now be delivered to a many different personal mobile devices, as well. A tremendous amount of change is required to transform to this new hybrid IT operating model.
To address this reality, the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has created a new methodology for creating hybrid IT transformation plans using agile software development techniques. This approach focuses on delivering new business and IT capability in six month sprints. This new approach is being well-received, and has been adopted by both and private and public sector firms around the world.
Curious about hybrid IT? At FoxNet we’re here to answer any IT questions you might have!
