A.K.A. Mr. Mission Impossible at the birthplace of the internet
Have you ever heard of Tim Berners-Lee? Tim could be easily the wealthiest man on this planet. Without him, Facebook, Amazon and Google probably wouldn’t exist today. Tim invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN. Just imagine he had decided to take his share of every business created on the internet. But fortunately, there are people on the planet who are not driven by money but impact.
The Project
My job was to help to identify business models for large-scale cloud computing as part of the EU project Helix Nebula. The following organisations wanted to collaborate with European technology providers to leverage their massive amount of data for solving global societal challenges.
CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) wants to find ways to use third-party vendors for storing their massive amount of data and make it accessible to all their associated researchers globally.
ESA (European Space Agency) wants to find ways how to notify people of earthquakes before they happen and alert technical assistance.
EMBL (The European Molecular Biology Laboratory) aims to decode the human genome to better tailor medical treatments like chemotherapy to the individual patient.
If you are interested in finding out more, check out this deliverable that we wrote for the European Commission.
Mission Impossible
The Mission Impossible of this project was determining all direct and indirect costs of CERN’s IT infrastructure. The aim was to have a comparison between the in-house IT costs and the outsourced costs by cloud providers. I had to present the findings on day three to the project lead and the entire senior technical leaders.
Excuse me, but who am I to advise senior technical people who are in charge of designing, implementing and running one of the most complex IT infrastructures in the world? The Large Hadron Collider is part of CERN, a 27 km tunnel and the largest single machine in the world, where particles collide up to 600 million times per second. At peak rates, 10 gigabytes of data may be transferred from its servers every second. Quite impressive, I'd say. But hey, who declines an offer to research at CERN? Seriously!
“If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!”
CERN is the world's largest centre for scientific research, not a corporation with sophisticated cost centre accounting. My first interviewee’s welcomed me by saying: “So you are the person with the Mission Impossible!" He had an idea of how difficult it’s going to be. The fact that he had more than 20 years of professional experience and lastly worked for Deutsche Bank managing private banking infrastructure in Europe didn’t help to build confidence.
Long story short. We found a way to narrow the cost gathering down to one of the hundreds of IT services CERN provides. We based the research on this specific use case which would give us a clear indication of the total cost of ownership to benchmark them with the proposals we received from the cloud providers. I have to say I was pretty relieved after the presentation. Imagine me, a recent graduate telling senior leaders how to run their organisation better including "make or buy" decisions. Admittedly, I've learned a lot from this experience, and I will never forget delivering this presentation.
The Surprise and the Learning
I had lunch in the canteen before leaving CERN. All of the sudden I see a familiar face, it was a guy I went to primary school with. Crazy. He was pursuing his PhD in Physics, and I haven’t seen him in years. Seriously, what are the odds meeting someone you know 1000km (620 miles) away in a research organisation with 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries?
So why am I telling this story? When were you afraid of a task that seemed insoluble to you, but you took a shot and made it, even if you had no idea how to solve it when you started out? I was intimidated at the beginning of tackling this challenge but somehow made it. Making it through is how you grow. So say YES instead of hesitating to accept challenges!
What was your Mission Impossible and more importantly, what's your next?