Leveraging Your IT Resources — The $mart WaySave money without sacrificing your trusted IT infrastructureBy Robb Dongoski I am often asked by IT executives, "Is there a way to control IT costs while ensuring that my IT infrastructure will continually function at the level my customers, partners, and stakeholders demand and have come to trust?" Unfortunately, there is no single or easy answer to this question. IT resources, infrastructure, and investment continually grow. According to the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), in the next year alone, companies will hire approximately 900,000 IT professionals. A recent ITAA survey states more than 10.4 million people's jobs focus on information technology. This statistic is for large corporations only and doesn't even include positions in government, not-for-profit organizations, or small entrepreneurial firms. The managers in all of these organizations - especially in view of the recent economic slowdown - have one thing in common: They're being asked to do more with less while maintaining a high level of trust with customers, partners, and stakeholders. Most executives look at their IT organizations and ask, "Are we seeing the ROI that we had identified?" or "Are we deriving the maximum business value while maintaining control of costs?" Arriving at an unqualified "yes" is quite often a leap of faith. The advent of the Internet, and all the variations of e-business that it has created, has made businesses rely more heavily upon trusted IT infrastructures now more than ever before. Effective IT infrastructure management is critical to enable your business to change and grow in the connected economy. Even with the best strategies, if you and your customers, partners, and stakeholders can't connect to your outside suppliers, if your network crashes, or if one of many databases fail, all the great marketing, well-conceived products, and cutting-edge R&D won't help you. Using the correct IT infrastructure management approach - viewed as part of an overall enterprise systems management (ESM) strategy - can help enable all aspects of your business. LOOKING AT THE PITFALLSTime and time again, organizations implement IT infrastructure management solutions that focus primarily on automating current business processes by purchasing cutting-edge technology solutions. Many companies have yet to see the ROI originally identified when they first formed their strategy. One of the most common pitfalls of an IT infrastructure management solution is overlooking the underlying processes that the technology is intended to improve. Without allocating the time, effort, and expertise to analyze the processes, major pieces of a costly suite of software can wind up being ineffectively deployed, or worse yet, shelved because of lack of perceived value. The most effective IT infrastructure management strategies focus on:
This approach takes a "big-picture" view and includes all the elements of people, process, and technology management. It focuses on business value by seeking to optimize the entire IT infrastructure - not just the technology tools. In other words, it emphasizes fixing the business and enabling the changes through technology. PROPERLY FRAMING THE CHALLENGEOne common scenario is when senior executives searching for ways to reduce costs arbitrarily instruct business and IT managers to cut, for example, 10 percent out of all infrastructure costs. This request, which may be the right approach in theory, is usually an unrealistic request that turns out to be the wrong stimulus for pursuing meaningful and achievable cost savings. To achieve these goals, business and IT executives would be better off identifying specific areas of improvement that are most in need of reengineering - before they automate or "cure" important and possibly essential components of the infrastructure.
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