In the change phases, the Lewin-Schein model suggests that the most important task is to clearly identify gaps between the current and proposed state. In the refreezing stage, the new behavior (in this case, the cloud) becomes the norm, i.e., the change has been institutionalized. Bottom line: in helping IT organizations determine what it will take to move to the cloud, IT vendors that are going to be most successful will have to identify--and directly or subtly address--behavioral issues and habits that have to be altered in order to achieve success, not just emphasize the technical and ROI benefits of their products. Addressing these behavioral issues helps organizations deal with the complexity at the heart of what needs to change.
The IT issue that creates the greatest dissatisfaction and the greatest need for change is complexity. Old-style complexity is inherent in the way that IT organizations evolved as custom-based shops. New-style complexity comes about from the introduction of increasingly dispersed technologies, beginning with scale-out servers but also including mobile devices, such as the Apple iPad. According to VMware, virtualization is key to how these devices will be supported and managed via technologies, including the company's View solution for virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI).
But after a certain level of virtualization, complexity increases and sometimes impedes performance. For example, when running many VMs on a single physical server, I/O bandwidth becomes a limiting factor in processes, such as backup. Other forms of complexity arise as vendors meet customer requirements. For example, to address IT organizations' desire to move VMs freely in order to take best advantage of hardware and business process requirements, VMware developed vMotion. And the list goes on and on.
Note that the increased complexity is a natural consequence of wanting to have more functionality or do more things, such as improved manageability and improved security, and is not due to the deliberate actions of vendors. Complexity is the natural result of the convergence of two immutable IT rules: 1) "you can't do just one thing," and 2) "the law of unintended consequences."
Think of the whack-a-mole carnival game where popping down one mole leads to another popping up. And that other mole was an unintended consequence, which may be desirable or undesirable. A good friend of mine used whack-a-mole to describe the case where once one bottleneck was solved another bottleneck took its place, such as in a server-storage-network environment.
