What does it take to make change?

May 2014 was a big month for me! I had a long trip to Australia and San Francisco for Cisco Live. This was my 2nd Cisco Live that I’ve attended, and the global event is making a positive impression on me.

I’ve been to scores of events, many for my role here at Veeam (a Cisco partner) but Cisco Live brings something different to the table. The themes of the events may change, but I feel the Cisco Live embodies the core of the change with trends such as the Internet of Everything. This is relevant today and in the future, but each of us can consume this theme differently.

As a technologist, I take in these themes and have the obligatory “Wow!” and “That’s cool!” after taking it all in; but what about when we return and get back into our daily routine? How do we get from here to there and make real change in our IT practice? That’s the hard part, but I’m convinced we can all get there in our own way.

When it comes to making changes, it starts now and one thing at a time. In my personal practice, I’m working diligently to deal with modern applications and better application architectures. If you are an IT pro, at some point you’ve had an application that you dreaded to support, update, maintain or develop. When it comes to applications, I believe we can all start there and alleviate obstacles. While we now live in a world where incredible compute platforms and network infrastructure exist to provide applications what they need, I’d rather not simply throw more hardware at bad software.

Let’s use the newest generation of compute and connectivity to do more with these applications: Give the application users a better experience and save the infrastructure teams future headaches. A modern application delivered on a modern infrastructure (Hint: Cisco) is the way to go today.

The demands are high, I call it an Always-On Business. We all get that, we deal with it every day. Whether it’s the ability to be connected anywhere, deploying new services quickly or being able to quickly recover when things don’t go as expected; the expectation today is high.

I realize it may seem easy enough to simply suggest changing an application. But, in the spirit of modern technology; we have a new outlet today to get from here to there in our IT community. Someone has done it before or is going through it with you. Whether you feel you can get insight from social media, your peers, forums or other online resources; these are tools you can leverage now (and in many cases for free) for additional insight on the hard part about getting from here to there.

Changing an application, even if only one at a time, may be the way to make real change in your organization and deliver an IT experience that is ready for the future. While each of our roles may not be candidates to take an Internet of Everything approach to our IT services; we definitely can’t still be in the business of delivering applications that look and feel like IT of 15 years ago.