Dial Tone
In terms of the looking at the big picture of IT and how AGL wants to move it forward, the team has focused on a robust and flexible architecture as the key lever for delivery. Boyles says that architecture will include the network components, both hardware and software; the "primary compute components" embracing everything that sits in the data centre, the mainframes, the mid-ranges, the servers; and the desktop applications that sit on top of that - what he calls the "dial tone".
"We've taken a very strong look at our whole architecture, and decided that to get the sort of flexibility and robustness that we want, we're going to have a very prescriptive architecture," he says. "Basically the idea is to make sure that every business initiative that we do can be accommodated on top of a flexible and robust infrastructure, and lets us over time - and again it's going to take several years once this is completely decided and agreed upon by the business heads along with the IT people - start building everything on top of this completely prescriptive architecture.
To this end Boyles has laid out a bare-boned approach to architecture that Tizi and the ITEC will go over in detail over the next few months. That includes a three-year-long journey towards a service-oriented architecture (SOA), components of which have already been put in place. But Boyles says as in most other organizations, the biggest impediments to adopting an SOA are likely to be cultural, with "box huggers" and "software huggers" tending to reflexively oppose SOA-type solutions.
"There are in my opinion - and I think I managed to prove this in a couple of big projects - no impediments to fully implementing service-oriented architecture, or Web component architecture, whatever you want to call it. Plus it's flexible, it's interoperable, because it's standards-based. You don't have to stick with a single vendor. And I believe any organization that is not fully focused on SOA and building things around portals and with Web components is going to miss the boat," he says.
"With the architecture then, what we're driving from that is how infrastructure will be built, and in fact how we will go back and rebuild infrastructure in some cases; how applications will be developed and what platforms they will run on, defining open standards-based applications through the use of XML and SOAP and other SOA components."
The kind of IT organization these changes ultimately create, Boyles says, is largely up to Tizi.
"What I think we've done is put the foundation in place - a good structure to build from," he says. "You can't change an organization in six months; it's a three- to five-year process to get really dramatic and lasting change. So Chez [Cesare] and I have had a couple of interesting conversations where I've told him more than once that he'll have plenty to do.
"He'll have lots of challenges and lots of fun, because I've found this in every job I've taken on: You can get everybody focused on the right things and put your road map in place and start improving your processes in a structured way in six to 12 months; but probably the toughest part of any job, and the reason why I've typically stayed in any job I've taken on for six to 10 years, is that week-to-week, maniacal focus on the road map then to actually deliver the outcomes. Because if you just talk about CMM5, if you're not actually taking the baby steps every month, you're not going to get there.
"It has to involve real cultural change, it's a three- to five-year process, and real cultural change comes about as a result of actually changing behaviour, changing the way things are done."
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