CIOs and IT managers are always challenged to do more with less. I have heard this again and again in my engagements with IT professionals at industry events and customer meetings. I am not saying that IT professionals are complaining. Instead, I get the feeling that it is a constraint (or given) that IT professionals have to work along with.
Several IT managers have summarized that they have been asked to improve established service levels, look for continuous improvements and deal with change, all under the constant pressure of flat or reduced IT budgets. Meanwhile, complexities in IT environments continue to rise as new technologies (e.g. virtualization) and new IT delivery models gain adoption along with interest in leveraging new data sources (e.g., unstructured, semi-structured).
On the flip side, business unit managers add more pressure to IT, and they want outcomes that range from expanding their customer base, to reducing order processing time and meaningful revenue growth from their investments in IT.
Look, I know how important IT is in an organization – and so do you. It isn't enough for IT to be merely efficient or remain internally focused in measuring IT specific metrics. Instead, IT mangers have to step up and start measuring value derived from IT infrastructure resources to meet these business requirements. These days, you have to prove your value and gain confidence.
How can you address all of these challenges at once? One desirable way is to make IT effectiveness a critical variable in the company’s overall business strategy and show how IT delivers services that contribute to business success.
I know we’ve been talking about many of these pressures in IT for quite a few years – but the current economic situation makes it even more important. At present, most IT organizations will hurt themselves by focusing on measuring internal operational efficiency without a connection between business value and IT performance.
What should you start looking at now for a well-managed IT infrastructure and operations organization? To establish a foundation for making fact-based decisions and raising credibility with the business, I suggest a systematic program for:
• IT resource optimization.
• IT service-level management.
• IT chargeback and financial optimization.
Resource optimization helps you analyze IT infrastructure resource (physical and virtual) needs in terms of how much is over provisioned or under provisioned, provide accurate forecast of future IT resource requirements and deliver insights into moving lockstep with business to meet the organization’s planning needs. The what-if scenarios and modeling capabilities inject new light on what type of impact is expected on infrastructure components from business growth so that IT operations staff can plan accordingly in terms of capacity, service-level commitments and licensing.
As more physical servers are deployed and shared between applications and business units and as IT tries to improve utilization of the infrastructure resources using server virtualization technologies, you will have to come up with a rational way to allocate costs and chargeback to business units using the resources.
IT definitely has the capability to deliver on more demands or requirements from business. The logical step is to document and present your business-oriented IT services with proper price points to establish a solid foundation for service quality and build trust with business. Remember your IT infrastructure growth should reflect business cycles and growth scenarios for both parties to understand and complement each other. IT has to become a critical path in building performance driven organization.
This is first in series of my blogs on IT Infrastructure optimization and IT performance management topics. Agree or Disagree? Bloggers, let’s open up for comments, arguments, additions, questions.
Stay tuned on my future entries on specific topics like business intelligence for IT, IT performance metrics, analytics for virtualized data centers, etc.
