Many new technologies or paradigms, like unified communications, converged networking, service-oriented architectures, and server virtualization, disrupt IT organizations and processes by undercutting the premises on which those organizations or processes were predicated. They also break them, by erasing or softening boundaries between technologies or by radically accelerating processes and thereby exposing the previously hidden gaps, flaws, or weaknesses.

Look at some of the same challenges IT faces with virtualization from the other direction and you can see that search, as a universal paradigm for understanding and discovering information, opens virtual space to everyone who may have a need to see into it. It won’t matter if the provisioning and such are arcane or held close to the vest by service engineers, because the configuration files and the logging data are equally visible to all who are using a search tool.

Using such a universal and repurposable tool helps break down or make irrelevant the divisions and politics within IT when it comes to having access to critical information. This in turn eases activities such as team restructuring and compliance auditing. It can provide stop-gap, ad-hoc access during testing and exploratory phases, and over time also provide the more structured and process driven visibility needed by mature processes controlling production infrastructure. In these ways, such tools enable faster IT evolution by letting operations keep up while organizations and processes catch up.

Since IT must often, in these cases, rely on the tools they have as they adapt to a new paradigm, again it is important to have tools that will adapt to new situations easily and fluidly, whose underlying principles and core user interface tenets will not need to be reconsidered and rebuilt for each brave new world IT seeks to conquer.