Getting a second perspective based on several decades of diversified experience can only fortify your decisions on strategically applying technology to your organization.

With demands on enterprise systems changing so fast, most organizations' architectures and frameworks of Intelligent Infrastructure are in a stressful state. Many are focused on trying to maintain obsolete systems and few are willing to make a major investment in change. What was considered state-of-the-art two or three years ago can be obsolete today.

With the intelligent infrastructure that is in place in a vast majority of corporate entities, most of it is from the last big round of investments to cover Y2K. That was fifteen years ago. Most enterprise infrastructure needs to be assessed to see if it still supports the core business as well as provides some degree of competitive advantage in today's market.

If it doesn't, it's obsolete. With the growth in mission-critical applications across the corporate enterprise, power and network diversity as well as redundancy become must-haves, and not a hoped-for, in intelligent infrastructure facilities.

These new design issues are mandatory and need to be incorporated into any enterprise network that is being planned today. In the past, many network architects did not think too much about network diversity or redundancy.

Today, with one-out-of-three enterprise-wide applications being mission critical, there needs to be a higher emphasis on designing in redundancy. The future trend for enterprise-wide applications is that they are going to be one-out-of-every-two applications being mission critical.

Masters and Apprentices
In earlier years of developing architectures for enterprise networks, the approach was having seasoned engineers and architects work with up-and-coming engineers to transfer some of the experience they had in developing networks to the junior staff. This type of approach is not being used today and the result is that we are not moving as fast in developing networks that are resilient enough to support technologies that are pushing the limits of current networks.

The Master/Apprentice approach to transferring and gaining enterprise network design skills should be revitalized and re-applied, especially since most organizations are not spending a lot of money on training beyond shallow webinars.

Let this quote by Hal Geneen, former Chairman of ITT, sink into your management and leadership skill set when it comes to tackling engineering and architectural problems with enterprise networks:

In business, words are words,

Expectations are expectations,

Promises are promises, but only

Performance is reality.

They are truly words of wisdom and should be applied when reviewing design approaches, complex vendor solutions, and implementation proposals. It rings true in a timeless fashion.

Today, we are in a very dynamic time. Several large industries are converging into a huge paradigm shift. We need diverse teams of multi-disciplinary skilled people to tackle these new challenges and come up with complex solutions.

Real estate, intelligent infrastructure, and technology are converging and their combined impact on regional economic development redefines corporate strategies. This is pointed out in my book, LOCATION LOCATION CONNECTIVITY.

In order to compete in today's global marketplace, every business and organization has to have a solid foundation. A solid Platform for Commerce that is comprised of all the layers of infrastructure (Ssee Chart 1).

Chart 1: Infrastructure: The Platform for Commerce

"Five Thousand Years in the Making"

Source: James Carlini, 2009, 2014. All Rights Reserved (From the whitepaper by James Carlini, INTELLIGENT INFRASTRUCTURE: Securing Regional Sustainability, written for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and presented at Columbia University (NYC))

Good guidance to products, strategies, leadership and setting the right multi-disciplinary direction when trying to build these new complex frameworks of infrastructure and technical support services is what is needed.

Today, that guidance cannot be found in most higher education curricula or corporate training. It is too new. It can be found here.

Carlini's visionary book Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Follow daily Carlini-isms at www.TWITTER.com/JAMESCARLINI

Copyright 2015 - James Carlini