Last week, Shel Holtz wrote a post entitled, Storage Schmorage.  In it, Shel talks about a particular IT Manager’s reluctance to allow social media in the enterprise.  The IT Manager cited “storage” as a reason that social media would be problematic.  “We don’t have the storage for those files!” exclaimed the manager (undoubtedly while doing his best impression of Star Trek’s Mr. Scott).  Shel and many commenters on his post thought the excuse rather lame and called the IT Manager’s reason “bunk.”   They further called for IT to move out of the way because the business (not IT) should be making these decisions.

“We don’t have the storage for those files!” 

For some time, I’ve noticed an undercurrent of hostility between PR/Marketing and IT.  There seems to be a general lack of understanding on both sides, and the push for social media behind the firewall seems to be exacerbating the issue.  I tried to explain through my own comment on Shel’s post that adding enterprise storage is a little more expensive and complicated than going down to Best Buy and dropping in the latest Maxtor drive.  I think business users have a general appreciation for what I was trying to say, but my point didn’t necessarily carry the weight that it should have.

We’ve reached a very interesting point in company politics.  While there have always been power users, people in the business who were technically savvy, I’m not sure that we’ve had the level of power user that we see today.  With so much technology in the hands of the consumer, there may be many cases where the business user actually has more knowledge in a particular area than anyone in the IT Department.  To make things even more unbalanced, many IT workers have not continued to learn.  They shut their terminals off at the end of the day and tune out the products and services that are rapidly advancing under the social media banner.

As advanced as this new breed of power user may be, the enterprise is still a different beast when it comes to implementing social media.  Before rebelling against your local IT Department, sit down and chat with your CIO about all of the issues that could come up with a social media implementation.  Once you understand your IT infrastructure and are prepared to help budget for the additional expenses, then you might be able to move ahead with your social media plans.

To better understand some of the issues with social media in the enterprise, I chatted for a few minutes with my local network engineer.  I threw some tough questions his way:  Can we support video for our employees?  How much would a terabyte of storage cost?  Do you get some kind of sadistic pleasure from saying “no” to your social media power users?

Firstly, a terabyte of data in the enterprise can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000.  My network engineer hadn’t ordered hardware recently, so he backed off from an initial estimate of $100,000 per 10 terabytes of data, but he still provided a starting point of around $3,000.  Why so much?  Business storage requires stability and reliability beyond what is expected from a home system.  That means mirroring disks, perhaps having redundant storage on the East and West Coasts, paying for maintenance that allows for quick replacement of drives when they fail, and backup costs for sending data to tape (which are then sent to off-site storage).  This $3,000 estimate isn’t huge, but if it’s not in the budget, it might as well be $1M.

We also discussed bandwidth.  I reasoned that most of the video from social media would be streamed, so the storage costs are not really the significant factor.  It’s actually the bandwidth that would be used for streaming video across the network.  My network engineer provided an example using Welcome Back, Kotter.  I’m a big Kotter fan, so I liked his example.  He told me that if 100 users each started watching a Welcome Back, Kotter episode during the day, our network could be affected.  What does that mean?  Well, it could mean that documents being pulled from the San Francisco office to the New York office might be delayed.  Our client-server timekeeping system could be impacted, perhaps resulting in error messages for the users.  In other words, real work might be affected because a few hundred people are watching a video.  Instead of saying it can’t be done, he suggested that we could improve our WAN bandwidth.  The cost to purchase the additional capacity would be about $3,000 per month ($36,000 per year).  My engineer never said he was against the expense.  He just said that the CIO would need to be convinced that this was necessary for the business, because, unlike what has been suggested, IT is part of “the business” and is responsible to “the business” to ensure that ALL systems are as stable and reliable as possible. 

While I agree that some IT people might be a little too quick to say “no” to a request, and many IT people are ignorant of the latest trends in technology, most are just trying to do a good job.  The engineer that I spoke with doesn’t want to stand in the way of the business.  He just knows what it takes to run a professional IT Department, and he’s protective of a system where hundreds of moving parts must work together in support of the entire company.