I have a feeling that this lady thinks that outside USA life doesn’t exist.
Some comments to some statements.

"The goal is to get to six primary data centers and zero server rooms" ===>
Concerning server rooms this could work in USA where WAN infrastructure is well developed. But this lady don’t know that in some other countries in the world WAN infrastructure is far away from the being ideal one and closing server rooms in such countries will simply stop IT services there or make them 10-100 times more expensive due to the data links costs. But decision is made and should be fulfilled and nobody cares about potential business impact.

"Instead of having many applications to support, we want to get to a centralized environment," Hackenson says. "That's a strategy change." Previously, Alcatel let IT groups and employees in the various regions select their own applications, so the application set in Asia didn't necessarily match the one in Europe. ===>
Again this lady doesn’t know that some applications in various regions are implemented due to the legal requirements in the respective countries. And also she doesn’t know that legal requirements, business environment, business practice, etc. could be very different in different countries. That’s why application set in Asia will never be the same as in Europe. Centralized environment approach here is just a dream of the uneducated person. But that person makes decisions at the level of the whole company.

"We had decided to move to a centralized model for the whole IT organization" ===>
Yes. They had decided. Again forgetting that under their management now is really international company but not practically pure US one which was before in Lucent times. Processes which work at the national scale will not always work at the international scale. When bigboss who sitting in France makes decisions for Brazil then quality of such decisions is evident. But again – who cares?

"We no longer can afford for every application to have its own environment. With that situation, we were 10, 20, 30 percent utilized," she says, with the new goal being 60 to 70 percent utilized on servers” ===>
They only thinking about the servers utilization. They don’t care about total ownership costs of running applications on that servers. I could imagine what’s the service efficiency and support costs would be if legally required Japanese application is running on the server located in Germany.

"That's our style," Hackenson says. "That's the way we try to manage projects in the organization." ===>
Their real style is applying strong top-down approach in decision making process using their US-only business knowledge (already very weak – remember recent Lucent performance?) at the international scale. With this approach they practically killing IT services in the company. And not only IT services. Customer base is also impacted by their decisions. For example could somebody imagine that external customer will buy infrastructure outsourcing services offered by Alcatel-Lucent when inside they are going to outsource management of their internal infrastructure?..

I can wish them only good luck because luck is the only thing they can count on with their understanding of international business and their management style...

The plan is all talk, very much political rather than proven practices. Every top managers were always insisting on the "cutting of costs" but the real truth has always been costs shifting.

In the past, Lucent had failed so many quarters. Alcatel was doing so well and now the results are getting worse with Lucent's management team.

Here's a simple challenge to Ms Hackenson: as a user of specific application, I need access. As simple as that. Do it on ebay, on yahoo, on google and see how quick and simple that is. Then do it within your own internal company and you can see how complicated that is. The results from Alcatel-lucent are that you'll be given multiple userids, passwords, then jump many more loops before getting access.

The difficult is not in the technologies or strategies because someone has already done it. The difficult is in the people: in order to do well, you must employ competent technical managers.
You must identify the technically incompetent ones and let them go. It is the real challenge because they might be technically incompetent but they are quite powerful in the management team.

Sorry, but the entire management team needs to thrown from the nearest cliff. These managers have nary a clue to how minimized the processes at ALU. If anything it's an excruciating process to get anything done due to the overwhelming amount of paperwork and fiefdoms. They need a Warren Buffett or grim reaper to walk the halls slashing away the useless management and wasteful policies of a grossly inefficient dinosaur.

Point 1.- Closing applications is harder than closing server rooms: what is there to learn? This is so obvious. Only IT illiterate people wouldn't know this.

Point 2.- Virtualization has become key to IT flexibility: "We can dynamically increase capacity in hours not days..." . What is she talking about? In a data processing environment,
for the last 25 years I never seen a case where the capacity needs just show up overnight: If a data processing center is run properly, the data center manager must know the capacity of his hardware requirements and take actions accordingly. Good competent people
know how to use monitoring tools to assess and control the processing power and hardware capabilities. How could the capacities requirements just went up overnight without any warning signs? just due to incompetency.

Points 3 to 7: Regular issues that many data centers have had during start-up, moves or improvements. Good competent data centers managers should be familiar with them. There is nothing really new in these points to be interesting.

One important point that should be added is the importance of utilising technically competent managers.
A data processing centre manager must know the rules of data processing. Basically the coordination of System Operations, Network Operations (which have become increasingly important),
and Applications Development must be under controlled by that important competent person.
The data center manager always knows how his data center is doing day in, day out. He knows how to use monitoring tools to tackle every negative sign early.

Regarding the issue raised by "INSIDER", ALU top level management team must issue an ultimatum to all directors: "If within 2 weeks, the processes under their responsibilities are not
being stream-lined, they will be shown the door." The directors or "Senior managers" that are at their office, just to sign approvals without knowing what they are signing, should all be replaced.

Utilizing directors who only have MBAs but not much of understanding how data is flowed and processed, is very costly to the organization. This is because incompetent people will utilize incompetent people.

This article gives the impression of through leadership and clear direction on IT when going forward. Unfortunatly this is the theory and part of the good news show - reality has different levels of perception as we all know. This (US!) centralized operating model just doesn't work while having a world-wide environment, having different cultures & timezones, being very complex,..etc. The result of this centralized managed model is a low performance model.Folks operating away form the ivory tower try to limit the damage by being very creative and using common sence or business starts to take their own initiatives on IT. A centralised model controlling IT & costs, right? At least the business understands that it's more clever to roll uphill a group of small rocks instead of a big rock, if the big rock falls down you have a real problem.

Do you really believe that more then 1 year after this merge a consistent set of processes and tools are used? Or that all current data centers and server rooms can be brought down to just six data centers? Let's face reality by coming back to the intial question: "Think your current IT project's scope is daunting? A good advice don't take the article critical lessons to seriously. Need a concrete example? The majority of the projects world-wide are already excuted or on their way to be implemented (just because de-centralised resources being alert and really understanding what the local business is about) while at the same time "the centralized team" is still wondering about the added value of the same "virtual" projects on their way in the demand management process. flexibility, right?...but hey: "that's our style," Hackenson says. "that's the way we try to manage projects in the organization.".

CXX's, just keep in mind - if you're ever have the opportunity to be on such a ship - make sure you have the right people, leadership and skills on board as the capability of singing "we're simply the best" is just not sufficient enough while being in the middle of a storm.

I don’t think the management behind this move did wrong however I believe that this was not a massive undertaking but more a colossal one. Before reading this I had never seen a data center consolidation propject on this kind of scale. Perhaps management was a bit to eager, perhaps not. At some point down the road though everyone will be singing them praises.

Interesting degree of heat in these comments...some of it condescending and detectably male scorn about a woman in the ranks. Some of it apparently user revolt from within ALU. Frankly I can't believe that a CIO would be given a green light to go and make blunders as simple as some of these commenters are suggesting. And there are contradictions. If ALU is rotted with deadwood you can't clean that out with a democratic process.

At the same time I'm wondering about Ms. Hackenson's consistent themes of "centralization" and "top-down decision making" and "efficiency". This is a deadly trio of ideas in the mind of a CIO and have led to any number of IT debacles.

Personally I feel that data center consolidation and virtualization is a solid move for ALU. Virtualization reduces costs and increases hardware utilization. When she speaks of being able to allocate additional capacity in hours, she's talking about spinning up additional virtual servers, not adding physical hardware. This allows them to adjust based on ACTUAL business needs instead of rash decisions being made on temporary spikes of usage.

As far as the debate between world-wide and US philosophy toward IT, I didn't read anywhere in the article that said she was disregarding local needs. It is pretty safe to assume that the offices in the UK and in Africa have a few applications that can be consolidated down without impacting the local market. Based on reading what was written, it sounds like the abundance of applications was a direct result of allowing each region to decide what applications to use, regardless of legal requirements.

All in all I commend Ms. Hackenson for her work at ALU and think this is the first step to significantly reducing IT overhead.