New Joint Presentation

Organizational Dysfunction Between IT and Facilities Leads to Sub Optimal Data Center Design and Delivery

Two ex-Gartner analysts, Bill Kirwin and Mike Bell, have combined their knowledge and expertise to address one of the greatest impediments to effective data center design and delivery: the historical rift between the enterprise IT organization and the facilities organization. These two groups have a joint responsibility to plan and deliver a world class data center environment for their company yet they typically fail to work together effectively. The result is budget over-runs, missed project schedules, and sub-optimal data center designs.
Kirwin and Bell have developed a presentation to address this issue. Kirwin brings a wealth of IT industry knowledge and experience to the topic, while Bell has over thirty years of corporate real estate and facilities experience, as well as many years at Gartner researching data center facilities topics.
The presentation is entitled :IT and Facilities Management: Chaos, Coup, or Co-op and offers a unique presentational format that combines both the IT perspective (Kirwin) and the facilities perspective (Bell) into a cogent analysis of how organizational dysfunction represents one of the major impediments to solving the data center facilities crisis, and how these two groups can work more effectively together.
More detail on the presentation:
IT and Facilities management have traditionally operated in separate worlds with distinct business cultures, differing professional orientations, different vocabularies, and conflicting operating objectives. The CIO lives or dies on the issue of reliability and uptime and business functionality. The facilities manager focuses on cost reduction, stable and predictable capacities and tolerances, and maintainability. The IT organization uses acronyms and other technical terms like MIPs, bandwidth, uptime, and throughput that seem like Greek to the facilities team. Conversely, the facilities staff talks in terms of square feet and cost per square foot. With the advent of technology convergence, virtualization, cloud computing, and high density processing these two worlds now collide, particularly in the context of data center planning and design, with potentially disastrous results.
In the context of the new IT technology, this presentation delves into this organizational conflict, examines the risks associated with a lack of collaboration between these two functions, and sets forth a road map for collaboration rather than collision.
Key questions to be addressed:
• What are the IT drivers that stress the data center facilities environment?
• What are the specific factors that result in organizational conflict between IT and Facilities?
• What are the risks associated with this lack of collaboration?
• What are the likely outcomes of doing nothing?
• What are the earmarks of a facilities orientation vs an IT orientation?
• How can IT and facilities management resolve their differences and work together to insure a flexible, cost effective, and sustainable data center facilities environment?
Presenters’ Background:
Bill Kirwin
VP Research and Business Development; Get Control.Net
Mr. Kirwin is an IT industry veteran with over 30 years experience in IT management, industry analysis, sales, marketing and support. In his 20 years as VP Research at Gartner, Bill provided thought leadership in end user computing, IT financial, operations and management key issues. He created the concept of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Enterprise Personality Profile (EPP) and applied it to IT user and supplier markets. He founded Gartner Software, Gartner Press and the Managing Distributed Computing practice area and was instrumental in developing Gartner Measurement consulting services.
Currently Bill is VP Research and Business Development at Cohesive Knowledge Solutions, a knowledge worker productivity training company that helps enterprises get control of email, info management and meetings.
Bill attended Southern Connecticut State University and graduated with a B.S. in Psychology. He also is a Certified TCO Expert and Alinean Value Selling consultant.

Michael Bell
President, Michael Bell Consulting Services LLC
Michael Bell is founder and president of Michael Bell Consulting LLC, which focuses on integrated workplace management; systems product evaluation and selection; data center facilities topics; telework, and strategic issues associated with the convergence of CRE and IT management. Mr. Bell was formerly a research vice president at Gartner Inc.; the world's leading IT research and advisory company for nine years, where he was part of the IT Infrastructure and Operations unit. His research focused on workplace transformation, change management, telework, data center facilities issues including expansions and relocations, virtual teaming, and facilities and real estate applications.(Integrated Workplace Management Systems-IWMS) Prior to joining Gartner, Mr. Bell worked for 30 years in operations and corporate real estate and held executive positions at Xerox, Dun & Bradstreet, and PricewaterhouseCoopers with a focus on the intersection of IT and the workplace. Mr. Bell is also a co-author of The Agile Workplace, a 2001 study of workplace trends produced jointly by Gartner, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and 22 industry sponsors. In the mid 1990's Mr Bell was president of the IDRC, the forerunner to Corenet. Mr. Bell earned a bachelor's degree from Brown University, a master of arts degree in the teaching of English from Colgate University and a master's degree in business administration from the Simon School at the University of Rochester. Mr. Bell lives and telecommutes from his home in the Low Country of South Carolina.
For more information on the presentation offering, contact:
Bill Kirwin
wdk@cohesiveknowledge.com
(860) 664-9421

Or

Mike Bell
Bell.mrmike@gmail.com
843-838-0094